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

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" 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. "

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

" Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I never stopped reading. "

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

" It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. "

" When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue. "

" I am your original autodidact. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

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

" For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying. "

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

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

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

" 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. "