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

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."

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.

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.

My friend and I have built a wall Between us thick and wide: The stones of it are laid in scorn And plastered high with pride.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

Do one act of kindness each day of the year and change 365 lives.

I told them my system was based on the "ant plan," that I'd gotten the idea watching a colony of ants in Africa during the war. A whole bunch of ants working toward a common goal.

A lively faith will bear aloft the mind, and leave the luggage of good works behind.

Let's save all the children, save the babies, save the babies.

People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?

I disconnected as a sleepy Seth stepped out of the bedroom. “Who’s Dante? Was that a collect call to the Inferno?” “They won’t accept the charges,” I murmured.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

Be true to your own highest convictions.