But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Make your education valuable. Apply what you learnt. Refuse to take the back seat and watch things happen. Join the change and be part of the change.

The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique; my movement is a result of your movement.

My grandmother influenced me so deeply.

I never get tired of hearing compliments.

I truly believe that while love can hurt, love can also heal.

Eighty percent of all questions are statements in disguise.

Today, there is no excuse for any one of us to sit back and go, "Ugh! There's nothing I can do about it."Because there is always something that can be done.

The right food always comes at the right time. Reliance on out-of-season foods makes the gastronomic year an endlessly boring repetition.

And it [acting] was exciting to me. And scary.