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

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

" Literature is analysis after the event. "

" It's very interesting what you don't care about. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better. "

" 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. "

" I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life. "

" All my friends' mothers were appalling women. "

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

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

" What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. "

" I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame. "

" Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling. "

" I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. "

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

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