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" 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. "

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

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

" Small things amuse small minds. "

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

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

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

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

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

Black And White

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

" I haven't got the energy to write now. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I am your original autodidact. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. "

" Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. "

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

" 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. "

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