Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
Doris Lessing
Small things amuse small minds.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
A story is how we construct our experiences.
I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.
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.
When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.
My father was in the First World War.
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.
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.
We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.
I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.
When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
Literature is analysis after the event.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
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.
I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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.
When there's a war, people get married.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
It's very interesting what you don't care about.
I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.
I am your original autodidact.
