Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Black And White

Related Quotes:

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

" 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 see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. "

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

" I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents. "

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

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

" It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. "

" I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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