Barbara Kingsolver

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

If I can add, say, 10 great new violin concertos to the repertoire before I'm done, that will be truly exciting.