It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they k….

Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing..

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history..

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results..

I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth]; it almost made me want to be a film-maker!.

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse..

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies..

We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat..

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile..

I never say I'm an "ist" of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it..

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers..

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart..

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?.

When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning,….

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault..

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what'….

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have a….

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing..

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant..

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through..