I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

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.

It's because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

I would say if I was any type of nerd, it was probably a band nerd.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.

And as she jogged out of sight, they could hear her muttering, "Tentacula. Devil's Snare. And Snargaluff pods. Yes, I'd like to see Death Eaters fighting those.

Men exist on the planet. We have to deal with them at some point.

Satan turned Eve's eye to the apple, Achan's eye to the wedge of gold, Ahab's eye to Naboth's vineyard, and then what work did he make with them!

You don't know what you can do until you try.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts