[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.

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.

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.

Here's to those who love the quiet, but thrive in chaos.

Do not let your bachelor ways crystallize so that you can't soften them when you come to have a wife and a family of your own.

In acting, you're only responsible for your part. When you're directing, the load is on your shoulders, so you have to feel a strong connection to the material. It's a higher bar to get over.

As to matters of dress, I would recommend one never to be first in the fashion nor the last out of it.

Life becomes inspiring, not in spite of the problems and the hard hits, but because of them.

Some people can handle fame, some can't.

The fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.

Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.