Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

One day I hope you understand when you reached out your hand, I grasped it, I never let it go.

I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.

Freedom to vote is valuable primarily as a means to safeguard other freedoms.

Whoever you are, whatever your dream, you have to be strong in your head and strong in your heart. Be strong. There's no quitting in the person who wants it bad enough.

Part of my dogsbody job during the 1983 election was choosing Mum's missile-proof clothes. They had to be disposable.

The Government will not abandon the free conversion of the rouble

I never learned to cook; I was a little spoiled as far as that's concerned.

I sound New York. I sound East Coast much more than a blonde person from L.A.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

My belief is that to have no wants is divine.