"American acculturation is a very powerful form of brainwashing. I know more about it now, but it's very difficult to move away from a world that you've been told was the greatest country on earth."

“There is no difference between the pain of humans and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for the young are not produced by reasoning, but by feeling, and this faculty exists not only in humans but in most living beings.”

“Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?”

“In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word 'fat.' 'Fat' is the word you hear shouted on the playground or in the street - it's never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won't have that filth in her house. At home together, we are safe. ... There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.”

“I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.”

“Touchstone watched, suddenly conscious that he probably only had five seconds left to be alone with Sabriel, to say something, to say anything. Perhaps the last five seconds they ever would have alone together. I am not afraid, he said to himself. "I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind.”

“Building trust is key to discovering and understanding your buyers' motives.”

“I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.”

Source : "In truth" by Andrew O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2007.

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”