My family has never been there for me. They expect things because we're blood.
One of the cruelest judgments sustained against me is that I have spoken out as a recovered alcoholic to stimulate my acting career.
I'm glad I am a woman who once danced naked in the Mediterranean Sea at midnight.
I believe in joy, but I believe in the flip-side, agony.
Alcohol is a very patient drug. It will wait for the alcoholic to pick it up one more time.
My only true harmony lies deep within my soul, wherever that is. I know that somehow I am in tune with the universe.
My anger made me drink as an escape from reality, a way of forgetting. But you don't know when the medicinal effect ends and the poisoning begins. . . This is my sixth year of sobriety. Overcoming alcoholism has been my greatest challenge and my greatest reward.
A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him
If a child shows himself incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.
The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.
I think that most of my books are part of some process of self-education, often about the places I go to. Most of all, they are about the peculiar tension between institutional loyalty and loyalty to oneself; the mystery of patriotism, for a Brit of my age and generation, where it runs, how it should be defined, what it's worth and what a corrupting force it can be when misapplied. All that stuff is just in me and it comes out in the characters. I don't mean to preach, but I know I do, and I'm a very flawed person. It's quite ridiculous.