The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.

I don't like the term mid-life crisis.

The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.

It is one thing to go on stage and be funny or be in a good place in your career, but for a woman, actually facing the elements in a physical way is a very powerful thing.

Love is an obsession. It has that quality to it. But there are healthy obsessions, and mine is one of them.

So many people suffer from abuse, and suffer alone.

There is a probably natural and learned reticence with myself talking about my early life.

When I came off the boat I was very proud of the thick calluses which had developed on my feet. But now, I am struggling to get into my favourite high heels which is a shame, as I have so many.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

There's been a number of erroneous biographies, articles and so on written about Billy and we both thought it would be a good idea to produce a true one.

There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us.

I don't think I'm generous enough to be the straight guy. I sort of make my own way and make my own statement. Do I mind pushing myself forward? Not at all.

There seems to be this impression that if I really am a psychotherapist, I can't be serious about it. They think there must be something fishy going on.

I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, an arid kind of place, but every day I took the ferry across the harbour to get to school. I'd watch the ships coming in and going out.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

I've really written my books for my husband and our family. They've brought us closer together by allowing us to discuss things that were unspoken for so long.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

We have a couple of dogs, but I wouldn't describe myself as an animal person.

The work of a psychotherapist involves being empathic and insightful with one's patients without getting too lost in their painful stories to be helpful.

Suffering from dysentery at sea was no picnic.

I loved my life, but my choices were overloading and overwhelming me. Listening to inner feelings and fulfilling some of these urges when they come along is incredibly important.

Most people who went about saying a ghost had poked them with a brolly would be locked up somewhere.

Being a psychologist did enable me to maintain objectivity.

Sexual dreams aren't usually about sex.

So many people suffer from abuse and suffer alone.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

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 novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.