Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

I believe only in art and failure.

If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't.

I'm convinced that the man who has learned to meditate upon the Lord will be able to run on his feet and walk in his spirit. Although he may be hurried by his vocation, that's not the issue. The issue is how fast his spirit is going. To slow it down takes a period of time.

Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

Follow your instincts and do not let other people's opinion of you become your opinion of yourself.

Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life--think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.

See the best in people and watch how they fight to prove you right.

Wars are made to make debt.

We played the same thing in Europe we played in the States.

Like every artist that comes out, you want to make a mark; you want to be a household name and you want to be someone that people are going to look back in ten years/fifteen years' time and go, 'I love this guy Olly Murs. He was brilliant back in the day; he was someone I really, really liked.'

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

We're very good at telling what happens and showing people while it happens... But sometimes television fails to take the time to say 'Why did it happen? What does it mean?' - To step back a little bit.

I'll buy an old jacket and attach gold buttons and a couple royal patches. Or I'll find an old busted sweatshirt, tear out the zipper, and replace it with a $700 zipper. I make things my own.

I judge people on how they smell, not how they look.

I feel I have so many projects and I haven't completed them yet.

My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.

A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.

We can't keep playing catch up as we have done for every season I've been here.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes - these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.

London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.

I can't remember when I wasn't running around doing some sort of a sporting activity.

At first, teaching was more or less a straightforward way of making a living and having access to institutional resources while writing - aka libraries. And that was not inconsiderable. But it didn't in any way touch the writing. Maybe it would push the writing aside sometimes, but mostly it was fine.

Judging people's flaws will not help justify your own.