I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

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.

If silence of the days and darkness of the nights is the indicator of the doomsday

Love gives the best of highsBut also the worst of hangovers.

Someone has to take the garbage out, someone has to cook the food, and someone has to clean the dishes. I want to do all of that.

We offer you the landscape of your birth -- Exquisite and despoiled. We all share blame. We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth For killing what we cannot even name.

I want to trace my father, could you suggest a good marker pen?

Compassionate conservative soft bigotry of low expectations.

Aging is the diminishing of early fearlessness.

I would have every man write what he knows and no more.

In a way I almost feel like the election of Donald Trump has inspired Democrats and progressives and punk rockers in a way that hasn't been seen since Vietnam.

There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.