Eating good food is my favourite thing in the whole world. Nothing is more blissful.

My father is a liar and so am I. But I’m going to stop. I have to stop. I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it.

A difference in self loathing? Please. The only difference between a gun and a rope is the time it takes to tie the knot.

The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken.

Zombies are the proletariat. Long live the workers!

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of Once upon a time shapes all the fiction Ive ever written.

I give people If You Came Softly when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.

My favourite vampires are all very scary indeed. So the idea of falling in love with one is just weird to me.

In Australia we have a government actively undoing what little progress had been made on climate change and stripping money from all the important institutions such as the ABC, CSIRO and SBS.

I love blogging, even though apparently it's still dying, and hate it when I have too much going on to do so regularly.

Blogging, I love you no matter how out of fashion you are.

The simplest way to Rejoice is to Count your Blessings and be grateful for them. You will automatically feel Joy in your Heart.

when I see you, I see mystery - a pale moon's beauty behind a veil of cloud

Happiness is a result of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.

I don't think a lot of people are able to relate to genuine patriotism, a genuinely good feeling about our country and its meaning to the rest of the world.

Courtship is to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.

I always start with the lyrics, because starting with the music means the words will be bad.

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe." "'Know thyself.'" "We try, sir.

Whenever you experience stress of any kind, look into yourself and ask, In what way am I compromising my innermost values in this situation?

I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.