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" You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books. "

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

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

" 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. "

" What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better. "

" What is a hero without love for mankind. "

" I never stopped reading. "

" Literature is analysis after the event. "

" I am your original autodidact. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" My father was always so mingled with rage at his life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. "

" For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. "

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