For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

I'm a lover not a fighter. But when I have to fight, I fight to win. There cannot be another outcome.

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

I developed a loyal following. No one knew I was homeless.

Everyone I know is looking for solace, hope and a tasty snack.

So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?" It doesn't tell me how I feel about it tomorrow or even a few minutes from now. It just tells me how I'm feeling right now.

Difficult, say you? Difficult to be a man of virtue, truly good, shaped and fashioned without flaw in the perfect figure of four-squared excellence, in body and mind, in act and thought?

Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him.