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" God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't. "

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" 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. "

" I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world. "

" I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful. "

" 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. "

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

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

" You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. "

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

" I am your original autodidact. "

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

" Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling. "

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

" My father was in the First World War. "

" In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better. "

" They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off. "

" The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war. "

" When there's a war, people get married. "

" September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible. "

" Pearls mean tears. "

" We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers. "

" I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women. "

" If you are a young writer today, it's very hard. "

" I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. "

" When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives. "

" I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city. "

" A story is how we construct our experiences. "

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