The PHRASE 'blue PLATE special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most SWEETLY nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.

I'd LOVE to do something LIKE 'A Canterbury TALE,' because I love the ENGLISH language.

Shakespeare's always been SITTING on my back, since I BEGAN reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the TIME. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is LIKE. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among WRITERS, I don't know who he is.

The English language STARTED out as a distortion in my LIFE, but NOTHING remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and TURN into SOMETHING else.

I think one of the BEST words in the ENGLISH LANGUAGE is 'compassion.' I think it holds EVERYTHING. It holds love, it holds CARE... and if everybody just did something. We all make a difference.

When I was a KID, it was thought I would do SOMETHING in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English LANGUAGE, and I fell in love with it.

After 'Othello,' it was, like, 'I can STOP acting. I have PLAYED one of the great characters in the ENGLISH language. I feel I have played him well and honorably. I have nothing to prove ANYMORE.'

I left SCHOOL at sixteen - I was fed up and RESTLESS. The only thing that interested me at school was ENGLISH language and literature, but I didn't have Latin, and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few DRAMA schools, not studying SERIOUSLY; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first DRAFT. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first SET down. I just FIND that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my INTENTIONS.

If Snowden REALLY claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil DISOBEDIENCE, he should go to some English language BOOKSTORE in Moscow and GET a copy of Henry DAVID Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'.