Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
It’s because I’m a feminist that I can’t stand women limiting other women’s imaginations. It really makes me angry.
Good writing is always new.
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
It’s a terrible poison, writing.
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction .
I’m more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they’re not.
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.
I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss.
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
Things are not what they seem.
On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.