I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

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.

Controlling people do not like to be controlled. Controlling people do not like to have their agendas obstructed.

As a brother and sister, our tastes were pretty different growing up. He liked a lot of early hip hop. My dad didn't understand it and would try to talk him out of it.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

I'd like to write fiction. Perhaps at some stage.

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

A lot of time, the music reflects reality, which reflects music.

How precious is the family as the privileged place for transmitting the faith.

I would like to employ more people but I don't want to empower my charities at the cost of exploiting people or doing things that are not useful, so I'm working on that.

I'm on a whisky diet. I've lost 3 days already.

It is astonishing that Monod's Les Adieux are not better known. This courageous French Reformed pastor was both passionate in his care for people and singular in his devotion to God.