Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn’t seem to lessen their horrors.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
When there’s a war, people get married.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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.
My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.
I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes – of course, there are thousands. It’s a very talented city.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
I wasn’t an active feminist in the ’60s, never have been.
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says.
My father was in the First World War.
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
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.
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.
We are all creatures of the stars.
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.