Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.
Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Mother’s room, and mother’s need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people’s rights.
An interim report – that is what an autobiography is.
Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.
It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.
Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability?
But children can’t be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn’t be.
Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
After a certain age – and for some of us that can be very young – there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before...
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
You have to deduce a person’s real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth’s corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.
I’ve always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
You can’t be a Red if you’re married to a civil servant.
I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.