Prayer is better than pills.

Katie soon learned there was a problem with hope.

Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.

The breeze around them seemed to drop – dead – like a door to the best things had just closed.

He had become the sky around the sun – alive, but not really there.

Youngsters deserve no opinions.

A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.

Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.

Shush – it’s silent time again.

I’ll be your friend until you find a better one.

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.

People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say thats completely opposite of the truth.

I don't think any country can survive as a prosperous and dignified country unless there is rule of law.

Even if a woman is abused a very long time ago, it comes out in her life in a negative way.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

You see the fairy tale - four minutes of glory at the Olympics. I thought my life would be cake after that.

A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion, experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but self-critical journey on the part of its owner.

I don't know how Hollywood sees me.

We shouldn't feel insulated just because water flows freely from our taps.

There have always been people who have written me off. They're not going away. I use that to motivate me. I'm driven to show them just how wrong they are.