I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

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.

No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.

Damn tricky cats!

The nature of life is mess, chaotic, exquisitely beautiful, excruciatingly painful, immensely joy-filled, and unpredictable.

We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to help people understand that animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves...

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

I think you can improve on that natural ability with training and exposure to great leaders of the past and to management theories.

All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless; it must be done by the Spirit.

I think I sort of have a love/hate relationship with a reputation I have for being the designer who works with grids.

I spend my time trying to figure art out. I was brought up to believe that the way one processes information is by making it into art. That's how I live my life.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.