Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I am here, a mind and a body. To say there's no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer.

Which death is preferably to every other? 'The unexpected'.

Julius Caesar

Imagination is the highest form of research.

Albert Einstein

Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.

Haruki Murakami

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

Aristotle

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

Cormac McCarthy

The aesthetic came along the way, I think - just through experimenting, and going on tour, and trying stuff out on stage, having fun with it, and not taking it too seriously. If I had a ballgown at home, I'd wear it onstage. If I found something in a charity shop, I'd wear it. That's where it grew from - just wanting to play dress-up.

Florence Welch

The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within.

William Cullen Bryant

God willing, we shall come to a stage where the world looks at the Palestinian question, and Palestinian rights on Palestinian national soil, as well as the questions of the occupied Syrian and Lebanese territories. These are the bases on which peace will be built.

King Hussein I

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Leo Buscaglia

The nobler the blood the less the pride.

Danish proverb

Order the beauty even of beauty is, It is the rule of bliss, The very life and form and cause of pleasure.

Thomas Traherne

I think clothes should make you feel safe. I like clothes you want to go to sleep in. I sometimes stand in front of a mirror and change a million times because I know I really want to wear my nightgown.

Gilda Radner