There's only one thing more boring than listening to other people's dreams, and that's listening to their problems.

Will you lie to me and promise to read them? Books need to be read. The pages need to be turned.

Yes, I hate it when people call me a 'national treasure'. It takes away your bite and makes you feel like a harmless old golden Labrador.

Love is the only thing that keeps me sane.

I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.

Most social problems could be helped or prevented if people had more money and practical advice.

I don't know why women are so mad about flowers. Personally, they leave me cold. I prefer trees.

Every time I start a new piece of work, I spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.

I think we take it for granted that if you are with your husband after 30 years, then he is the love of your life.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.

Sometimes in life there's no problem and sometimes there solution. Within this space - between these apparent poles - life flows.

Pasta is the one food I can't live without. It's the food I eat to fuel my running.

The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.

Without God at the beginning, there can be only confusion at the end.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden.

There is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats.

You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.

Listen," Mac interrupted, "you still have to knock it out of the park. But it's a degree-of-difficulty thing. You're doing a triple lutz and she's skating. You're the Sasha Cohen here.