The prize I value most was given to me 60 years ago. I was named the girl with the cleanest fingernails.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it's any different.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

Moonlight lined the windowsills like a fall of snow.

We can only find those faults in others that already exist within us, and the same goes for those things we admire about them.

Hold on to the darkness... I will come looking for your light.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different.

I'm stupid, I'm ugly, I'm dumb, I smell. Did I mention I'm stupid?

There is something in statistics that makes it very similar to astrology.

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.

If there is a connection between Harry Potter and my new novel, it's my interest in characters.

Personal weapons are what raised mankind out of the mud, and the rifle is the queen of personal weapons.

The beauty of nature has been one of the great inspirations in my life.