I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.

I had the constitution of a missionary.

In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

He couldn't be a doctor, or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

People have two sides, a good side and a bad side, a past, a future. We must embrace both in someone we love.

In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

if there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?

But as a young model, I never felt as beautiful as I looked.

Sincerity is like traveling on a plain, beaten road, which commonly brings a man sooner to his journey's end than by-ways, in which men often lose themselves.

I preserve things that are significant to me. Only time will determine what is important in the long term. But something can be rediscovered only if someone has collected and preserved it.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.

When someone is denying what they are, then that's when things start to spiral down.