My biggest weakness is patience, wanting to see things happen too quickly or get changes in place right away. Not having the patience to let things develop.

Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men's heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.

Francis Bacon

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

Colleen McCullough

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism. Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clich?s about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

Julie Burchill

Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family --a domestic church.

Pope John Paul II

The first lesson I've learned is that no matter what you do in your life, you have to figure out your own internal rhythms - I mean, what works for you doesn't necessarily work for your friend.

Hillary Clinton

Life is a loss of time.

Gerhard Kocher

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Ayn Rand

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke

I half knew what to expect when I saw the cricket ground in the morning. It was when I started to talk to people working out there, I began to find what I was looking for.

Ian Botham

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Wallace Stevens

You have to keep hobbies in L.A. Otherwise, it's sad.

Lake Bell

I think there's too much emphasis on beauty. I find it so limiting. I think just be yourself. Be who you are.

Molly Shannon