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

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

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

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

" A story is how we construct our experiences. "

" 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. "

" They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

" I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government. "

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

" 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. "

" All my friends' mothers were appalling women. "

" 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. "

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

" 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'm compulsive. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "