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

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" 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. "

" Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work. "

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

" I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married. "

" 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. "

" My father was always so mingled with rage at his life. "

" All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed. "

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

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

" I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government. "

" I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement. "

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

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

" 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. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires. "

" Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. "

" Literature is analysis after the event. "

" 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. "

" I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been. "

" I have ideas that I will probably never write now. "

" A story is how we construct our experiences. "