Quotes

When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now.

Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.

If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.

Usually, turkey burger recipes result in something so lifeless and tasteless that drowning one in ketchup (that most perfect and delicious of condiments) doesn't help much. Part of the problem is calling this food a 'burger' at all, because it's never going to satisfy the way juicy, salty, medium-rare beef will.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.

I've behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven't behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you're a woman, you're not in a position to behave as badly, because you don't have the economic power.

Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.

I would like to have a more social life than I have.

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing.

Key Largo... I could have stayed on that picture for the rest of my life. I adored it.

Death is Inevitable. Living a life we can be proud of is something we can control.

My purpose is to help people be more comfortable with their pain and realize that they have power and a lot to give regardless of whether their life seems normal or not.

A lot of people say when you get a short life span you want to go out and do all of this crazy stuff like go bungee jumping and travel to exotic places. But you just want to live.

There's so much more to life than just being healthy. There's so much more to life than just being normal.

I'm grateful for the doctors that'll be scooping out these lungs and giving me some more life to work with. I'm grateful for the chance to keep being a person.

I was only 13 years old when I was forced to face the fragility of my own life. A routine surgery landed me in a medically induced coma for two weeks with a mere 1% chance of surviving. But survive I did.

If my biggest problem in life was to be healthy, I'd be incredibly bored.

What happens when you have an illness where you're never going to be healthy? Does that mean I'm never going to have a life? Am I never going to do anything or be anything other than a sick kid?

I don't want to actually die. I want to see what happens in life. I want to see where it goes.

Growing up, I didn't have any role models that were sick that were doing anything with their life, ever.

As I got older, my life become a whirlwind of homework and responsibilities. The hospital became my retreat, a place to gather my thoughts and focus on my health. The nurses are my friends as well as my caretakers. The doctors are my parents as well as my physicians.

I had moved around my whole life. That was the one thing that was always so hard.

I think my parents are the first influence on me music-wise. My dad was into Motown and soul, and my mom was into British '80s pop, like The Trashcan Sinatras. I grew up on that. It was great. They were the first people to really bring music into my life.