She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.