There are so many people who write really interesting work and try super hard and still don't get published.

I think someone who writes a ghost story probably needs to believe it in some way.

I've heard a lot of editors and agents say, "If the book is good, it will get published." I totally disagree with that.

It's really difficult to know what is the best way forward when you're not getting a lot of support - and probably most writers aren't getting enough support.

I love ghost stories, I love to read them, and I love the idea of being haunted.

Nice girls are not supposed to be hungry. They are not supposed to feed themselves or care about their own food. They're definitely not supposed to take food out of a child's mouth.

It is radical for a woman to choose to survive and to choose to eat anything.

When I was in college, I had a friend who was an artist and her theory was that all the best art in the world is funny/sad. That was her favorite genre. Funny/sad are probably my two favorite tones.

I've always been a teaser, even as a kid.

Don't you think almost anything can be funny? Almost anything.

You can hurt people's feelings if you laugh.

The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.

History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.

I am struck by how many leading women... today started as Girl Scouts. It is an organization that obviously develops strong women leaders.

I am one of the funniest people on the planet.

People are like moths. First they are ugly and awkward, until they break out of their shell and become a beautiful butterfly.

Because of the Thames I have always loved inland waterways - water in general, water sounds - there's music in water. Brooks babbling, fountains splashing. Weirs, waterfalls; tumbling, gushing.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

The beauty of Zen is found in simplicity and tranquility, in a sense of the all-embracing harmony of things.

I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.