England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.

Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.

If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.

Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and better out than in.

I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.

Each time he came he would twist my defenceless body into a different pose, as if I were his very own doll

My greatest gift ever is public embarrassment and shame

Revolutions are not made they come.

Beloveds, you are fine, just the way you are! Perfect in your imperfection! You are divine! Growing brighter and more brilliant each day, you can accept the truth of who you are.

Hope makes the impossible possible.

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

There's a lovely freedom of will when you approach a character that no one has really come across before, because it is your own interpretation.

I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on a ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in question--to be defended from the beginning to the end.

I'm not trying to ally myself with the rock stars of the universe.