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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary! "

" Small things amuse small minds. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better. "

" If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air. "

" Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling. "

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

Black And White

" I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. "

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

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

" I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement. "

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

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

" Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. "

" I'm compulsive. "

" 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. "