The more you learn, the less you fear.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.