growth Quotes

If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.

You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.

With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.

In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.

Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.'

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

Our lives teach us who we are.

I did a lot of student acting when I was young.