Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

It's one of the things I love most about being an author - seeing the different covers from each country.

It's estimated that there may be two hundred and fifty million children in the world engaged in some form of exploitative child labour.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

I'm not a comic book character. I'm not Indiana Jones or Bond, I'm a flesh and blood guy who is ageing and changing. I don't have to do what I did in '93. I couldn't do it and thank God.

Black people have been killed for directing their gaze at the wrong person. I want my subjects to reclaim their right to look, to see, to be seen.

My stuff is my stuff. Sometimes it's not as successful as some of the other stuff. But it's my stuff.

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

I tell the truth, and I expose myself as a weak, misguided, misdirected, dysfunctional human being I used to be.

When you become who you wish to be, there is no need for envy.

We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree.