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

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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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Literature is analysis after the event. "

" That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools. "

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

" 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. "

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

" My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother. "

" I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town. "

" 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. "

" 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 am your original autodidact. "

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

" 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. "

" Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time. "

Science Fiction

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

" 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. "