Bruce Parker's The Power of the Sea is an engaging and essential history of science. It’s also a terrific account of survival on our wild blue planet.
I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.
Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake all afternoon.
The male - I have found - is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.
Youve simply got to go on and on with your family and friends and tell them how much you love them because you never know whether theyll be there tomorrow, do you?
it's a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extricating himself.
I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.
Faith is not primarily a function of how you feel. Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.
The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.
When we use stereotypes, we take in the gender, the age, the color of the skin of the person before us, and our minds respond with messages that say hostile, stupid, slow, weak. Those qualities aren't out there in the environment. They don't reflect reality.
When boys and girls go out to play there is always someone left behind, and the boy who is left behind is no use to the girl who is left behind.