Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people’s company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’
She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl’s genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Oh cat, I’d say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares...
A story is how we construct our experiences.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don’t.
There’s always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they’re usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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.