People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

I think writers are very anxious.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

Silence gradually spread its great, fragile butterfly wings across the ward. The sun had disappeared, replaced by grey and rain. This particular month of July was reading the script for March.

There's always going to be that pressure when you're in front of the camera. When you're famous it's just an extreme version of reality and there's a pressure to look a certain way.

Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

There come nought out of the sacke but what was there.

... in the present State of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage.

In some parts of the world, you get scrutinized for saying the wrong thing about art and in other regions, you get scrutinized for saying nothing at all.

Becoming a comedienne was my way of adjusting to puberty.

Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.

Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.