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" It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you. "

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" Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle. "

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

" The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune. "

" 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. "

" There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful. "

" All my friends' mothers were appalling women. "

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

" Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. "

" 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.' "

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

" Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew. "

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

" I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring. "

" A story is how we construct our experiences. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia. "

" Things are not quite so simple always as black and white. "

Black And White

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

" 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. "

" I am your original autodidact. "

" The thing is, I haven't changed at all. "

" Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. "

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