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" I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish. "

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" 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. "

" It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important. "

" There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. "

" If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air. "

" I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done. "

" I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge. "

" I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot. "

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

" A story is how we construct our experiences. "

" Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary! "

" 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. "

" We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed. "

" I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing. "

" Literature is analysis after the event. "

" 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. "

" I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. "

" My father was in the First World War. "

" The human race has been telling stories since it began. "

" Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling. "

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

" You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books. "

" You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much. "

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

" What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible. "

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

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

" It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.' "