It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.

I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.

I delight in what I fear.

The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.

We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Aim high to achieve excellence. Be determined to succeed. Use self-discipline to achieve golden excellence.

I am a monster because I have too much of something.

It is Patrick the Legend, of course, who is most engaging and comes to us as something of a happy Celtic party monster.

The best advertising and the best communication when it comes to business is that which makes you smile, that which makes you think, that which makes you ponder.

If it doesn't look easy it is that we have not tried hard enough yet.

I only unwind at facials and massages.

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

One of the truest tests of spiritual maturity is seeing the miraculous in the monotonous.

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.