I don't envy men and I certainly wouldn't like to become one now.

It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print.

If you can't return a favor, pass it on.

I never felt any different from anyone else though.

Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.

Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls.

Sometimes I like to play the soundtracks to famous musicals so we can all sing along. South Pacific is one of my favorites. Our neighbors must hate us.

Reading is my greatest luxury.

Never give up. And most importantly, be true to yourself. Write from your heart, in your own voice, and about what you believe in.

The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them - and for my daughters, too.

I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.

People still come up to me and ask whether I am Louise Brown or if they've seen me somewhere else before.

I have a good collection of cookery books. This is not so much because I like cooking, but because I like eating.

I like many types of music and probably too many to mention here.

I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people.

Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children's bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.

When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I've found it hard to read as much as I'd like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so.

The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places.

I don't envy men and I certainly wouldn't like to become one now.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

Remember that what you have is unique because it's your own special way of looking at the world.

I used to think about how I was conceived quite a lot when I was about 10 or 11, but I don't think about it at all now that so many other babies have been born in the same way.

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

Then I obviously didn't understand what it all meant, but I do now.

I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.

When dad told me Mr Steptoe had passed away, I broke down.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

Envy like fire always makes for the highest points.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

Envy is an insult to oneself.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

Exploiting people's emotions of fear, envy and anxiety is not hope, it's not change, it's partisanship. We don't need partisanship. We don't need demagoguery, we need solutions.

Only fools live in the past or carry envy to the present.

Pride, which inspires us with so much envy, is sometimes of use toward the moderating of it too.

On every movie I've done as a director, I look at the producers and having done it, I don't envy them, at all.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

I don't work a five-day week as a rule, and I've managed to fill that time up. It hasn't been that hard. I volunteer at school. I'm working because I love it. Yet, I don't not envy women who have a stay-at-home job, because you miss stuff.

On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts.

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.

Skating takes up 70 percent of my time, school about 25 percent. Having fun and talking to my friends, 5 percent. It's hard. I envy other kids a lot of things, but I get a guilt trip when I'm not training.

The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.

When I went to Philadelphia I was 26 years old and really sitting on top of the world. Family life, a professional career, plenty of friends and associates, and a good reputation, a wish list that could be the envy of many.