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" As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital. "

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" I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life. "

" There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. "

" What is a hero without love for mankind. "

" Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance! "

" There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't. "

" I'm compulsive. "

" There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to. "

" Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse. "

" Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. "

" Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing. "

" I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. "

" You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. "

" Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling. "

" I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame. "

" I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading. "

" 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 don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. "

" Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds. "

" I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle. "

" Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. "

" A story is how we construct our experiences. "

" I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars. "

" I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. "

" 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. "

" My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies. "

" My father was in the First World War. "

" This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. "

" It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months. "

" I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I. "

" 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. "