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

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.

Johnny Winter is one of the best blues players in the world. He's very underrated.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Well concerning the world records that I did, I think it helps a lot to me, yeah. I think it's a very individual thing because I heard some people say, like, oh I don't like it at all. But I definitely, for me it really made a big difference.

Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which would be less and less able to judge what the experiments were about.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the 'evil empire' ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not.

I think having eight kids evens things out a bit. You learn about the world; you learn about the world; you learn you've got to get along. We're all - if anything - very adjustable.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

The world remains ever the same.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

In their greatest hour of need, the world failed the people of Rwanda.