Time is how you spend your love.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

Confidence can be learned - but not from a book. Confidence comes from from living.

Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.

I have an incredible role model in my mom. She was a single mother raising two kids in New York.

I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike; One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.

Only those who walk in holiness experience true joy.

...what happened in New York and Washington is the same thing that England and America did to Berlin every day for three years during World War II -- and Germany did the same thing to England.

I get to kind of pretend I'm going to play baseball. I get to work out and do all the stuff that was part of baseball. I just don't get to play.

Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche.

I close my eyes and can see men drawing lines in the dust. America pushes through the membrane of mist and smoke, and I'm a small boy again in Bogalusa.