It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.

Images of resentment and revenge only have us spending the precious moments of our lives imagining the 'other' as both dangerous and important!

I have no belief in the system. So Sonny is perfectly at home (in Washington D.C.). Politicians are one step down below used-car salesmen.

I swear that I'm dying slowly but it's happening, and if the perfect spring is waiting somewhere... just take me there.

As journalists, we need to find every avenue to distribute our work, and try to be so good that we become increasingly more influential than before.

When you do not have the basic requirements for survival and safety and belongingness and where there are huge inequities then fear turns into hatred.

I can tell women's confidence levels rise when they wear heels.

Some had rather lose their friend then their Jest.

My first paid role was my first job out of drama school, which was Just William. It was a BBC TV show. I played Ethel.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire . . .