Reading is my greatest luxury.

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.

Yes, but don't forget I also have the luxury of the worlds finest band when it gets lonely.

I've been lucky enough to have had the luxury of being able to make the picture I've wanted to make each time on my own terms and without compromise.

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us.

There are a lot of things going on with my life right now that don't just have to do with career. So I have a hard time making decisions about work. That's really a luxury problem.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

But that's one of the nice things about doing a stage show, if something doesn't work out, you have the luxury of working on it over time.

Pain adds rest unto pleasure, and teaches the luxury of health.

In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail.

I have a kind of objective luxury about my career.