The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.