There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

If you have read 6, 000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment

When you are pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen, brush the honey off your nose and spruce yourself up as best you can, so as to look Ready for Anything.

The only day in your life.... Your mother smiled when you cried.

CARNIVOROUS, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous vegetarian, his heirs and assigns.

In 1983 I'd had a number one. I'd sold 6 million copies of Total Eclipse Of The Heart all over the world.

I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool.

We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.

To survive, the people in neighborhoods are going to have to secede.

Until I figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up, I'm not going to be grown up.

You just cannot cut a country in two any more than you can cut a human being in two. If you do, you do not have two human beings; you have a corpse.