Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. …)
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
It is my belief…that the talents every child has, regardless of his official ‘I.Q,’ could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
As I was saying, that’s the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.
Free women,” said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: “They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.
Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.
In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say – he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.”“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?
I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?
Younger woman says, “I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.”“Yes,” [older woman responds] “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?
Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
…or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people’s company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – “nostalgia” is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.
The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.
It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.
You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
That’s what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a new way.
Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself.
Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself.
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think feel experience with a man they are in love with is still very small.
What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It’s not that you say, ‘I want to write a science fiction book.’ You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
I think kids ought to travel. I think it’s very good to carry kids around. It’s good for them. Of course it’s tough on the parents.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, ‘Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,’ reducing it to a simple formula.
When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
There’s an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.