Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

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.

Have a good day on purpose, then elevate your efforts towards other and enjoy a great day in purpose.

Invest in basic research and recruit the best minds.

I've always tried to be cheerful, because I think people who whine are boring, and I never could tolerate bores.

My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.

G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else.

He loves power. He loves control because others, you know, dad and stuff like that, but he's just a great guy. He's just a great guy.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

If $85 million is not enough to take care of my family and other generations of my family, then you’re stupid.

I believe in reincarnation. In my last life I was a peasant. Next time around, I'd like to be an eagle. Who hasn't dreamed they could fly? They're a protected species, too.

I never went to drama school.