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At Last I Understood That The Way Over, Or Through This Dilemma, The Unease At Writing About 'petty Personal Problems' Was To Recognize That Nothing Is Personal, In The Sense That It Is Uniquely One's Own. Writing About Oneself, One Is Writing About Others, Since Your Problems, Pains, Pleasures, Emotions—and Your Extraordinary And Remarkable Ideas—can't Be Yours Alone. [...] Growing Up Is After All Only The Understanding That One's Unique And Incredible Experience Is What Everyone Shares.

-Doris Lessing

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At Last I Understood

Doris Lessing

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At Last I Understood That The Way Over, Or Through This Dilemma, The Unease At Writing About 'petty Personal Problems' Was To Recognize That Nothing Is Personal, In The Sense That It Is Uniquely One's Own. Writing About Oneself, One Is Writing About Others, Since Your Problems, Pains, Pleasures, Emotions—and Your Extraordinary And Remarkable Ideas—can't Be Yours Alone. [...] Growing Up Is After All Only The Understanding That One's Unique And Incredible Experience Is What Everyone Shares.

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My Father Was Always So Mingled With Rage At His Life.

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It Was All Wrong, Ugly, Unhappy And Coloured With Cynicism, But Nothing Was Tragic, There Were No Moments That Could Change Anything Or Anybody. From Time To Time The Emotional Lightning Flashed And Showed A Landscape Of Private Misery, And Then — We Went On Dancing.

When I Became Political And Communist, It Was Because They Were The Only People I Had Ever Met Who Fought The Color Bar In Their Lives.

I Wanted To Write About My Mother As She Should Have Been If She Had Not Been Messed Up By World War I.

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There Are No Laws For The Novel. There Never Have Been, Nor Can There Ever Be.

People Who Have Lived Through A War Know That As It Approaches, An At First Secret, Unacknowledged, Elation Begins, As If An Almost Inaudible Drum Is Beating ... An Awful, Illicit, Violent Excitement Is Abroad. Then The Elation Becomes Too Strong To Be Ignored Or Overlooked: Then Everyone Is Possessed By It.

What Really Fascinates Me Is This Need That Is So Strong Now That If You Read A Work Of The Imagination You Instantly Have To Say, 'oh, What This Really Is Is So-and-so,' Reducing It To A Simple Formula.

I Wanted To Highlight That Whole Dreadful Process In Book Publishing That 'nothing Succeeds Like Success.'

Perhaps It Is Not Such A Bad Marriage After All? There Are Innumerable Marriages Where Two People, Both Twisted And Wrong In Their Depths, Are Well Matched, Making Each Other Miserable In The Way They Need, In The Way The Pattern Of Their Life Demands.

We Always Seem To Be Surprised By Events, Especially By Catastrophes, But Also By Wonderful Events. Look At 1990, The Year That The Soviet Union Collapsed And Apartheid In South Africa Collapsed And The Berlin Wall Came Down. I Don't Know Anyone Who Foresaw Those Events. It Seems To Me That As A Species We Are Constantly Trying To Adapt Ourselves To The Unexpected. In The Meantime, We Talk As If We Are In Control, And We're Not. This Seems To Me To Be The Truth About The Twentieth Century.

In The Writing Process, The More A Story Cooks, The Better.

Because I Was Permanently Confused, Dissatisfied, Unhappy, Tormented By Inadequacy, Driven By Wanting Towards Every Kind Of Impossible Future, The Attitude Of Mind Described By 'tolerantly Amused Eyes' Was Years Away From Me. I Don't Think I Really Saw People Then, Except As Appendages To My Needs. It's Only Now, Looking Back, That I Understood, But At The Time I Lived In A Brilliantly Lit Haze, Shifting And Flickering According To My Changing Desires. Of Course, That Is Only A Description Of Being Young.

I Don't Think San Francisco Needs Defending. I Never Meet Anyone Who Doesn't Love The Place, Americans Or Others.

The Current Publishing Scene Is Extremely Good For The Big, Popular Books. They Sell Them Brilliantly, Market Them And All That. It Is Not Good For The Little Books. And Really Valuable Books Have Been Allowed To Go Out Of Print. In The Old Days, The Publishers Knew That These Difficult Books, The Books That Appeal Only To A Minority, Were Very Productive In The Long Run. Because They're Probably The Books That Will Be Read In The Next Generation.

What They [critics Of Lessing's Switch To Science Fiction] Didn't Realize Was That In Science Fiction Is Some Of The Best Social Fiction Of Our Time.

It's Amazing What You Find Out About Yourself When You Write In The First Person About Someone Very Different From You.

For She Was Of That Generation Who, Having Found Nothing In Religion, Had Formed Themselves Through Literature.

If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

Think For Yourself

I Am Sure Everyone Has Had The Experience Of Reading A Book And Finding It Vibrating With Aliveness, With Colour And Immediacy. And Then, Perhaps Some Weeks Later, Reading It Again And Finding It Flat And Empty. Well, The Book Hasn't Changed: You Have.

Intelligence Forbids Tears.

Women's Emotions Are Still Fitted For A Kind Of Society That No Longer Exists. My Deep Emotions, My Real Ones, Are To Do With My Relationship With A Man. One Man. But I Don't Live That Kind Of Life, And I Know Few Women Who Do. So What I Feel Is Irrelevant And Silly.

My Major Aim Was To Shape A Book Which Would Make Its Own Comment, A Wordless Statement: To Talk Through The Way It Was Shaped.

Men Are Unwise And Curiously Planned.

Sleep Is Harder To Reach And Thinner, And Sleeping Is No Longer The Drop Into The Black Pit All Oblivion Until The Alarm Clock, No, Sleep Is Thin And Fitful And Full Of Memories And Reminders And The Dark Is Never Dark Enough.

There Is Only One Way To Read, Which Is To Browse In Libraries And Bookshops, Picking Up Books That Attract You, Reading Only Those, Dropping Them When They Bore You, Skipping The Parts That Drag-and Never, Never Reading Anything Because You Feel You Ought, Or Because It Is Part Of A Trend Or A Movement. Remember That The Book Which Bores You When You Are Twenty Or Thirty Will Open Doors For You When You Are Forty Or Fifty-and Vise Versa. Don’t Read A Book Out Of Its Right Time For You.

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.

If We Were To Put Into Practice What We Know ... But That Is The Point.

I Think Novelists Perform Many Useful Tasks For Their Fellow Citizens, But One Of The Most Valuable Is This: To Enable Us To See Ourselves As Others See Us.

Her Own Contempt For Any Forms Of Pressure Society Might Put On Her Was So Profound And Instinctive That She As Instinctively Despised Anyone Who Paid Tribute To Them.

It's Lovely To Have Money To Give Away - That's The Bonus Of Winning The Nobel.

The Novel Has Become A Function Of The Fragmented Society, The Fragmented Consciousness. Human Beings Are So Divided, Are Becoming More And More Divided, And More Subdivided In Themselves, Reflecting The World, That They Reach Out Desperately, Not Knowing They Do It, For Information About Other Groups Inside Their Own Country, Let Alone About Groups In Other Countries. It Is A Blind Grasping Out For Their Own Wholeness, And The Novel-report Is A Means Toward It.

We've Got To Believe In Our Beautiful Impossible Blueprints.

This Is A Catastrophic Universe, Always; And Subject To Hidden Reversals, Upheavals, Changes, Cataclysms, With Joy Never Anything But The Song Of Substance Under Pressure Forced Into New Forms And Shapes.

A Woman Writer, Quitting Love Before Literature When Love Lets Her Down, Will Put Literature Before Love.

I Never Thought Of London In Terms Of Possible Heroes - Of Course, There Are Thousands. It's A Very Talented City.

The Older I Get The More Secrets I Have, Never To Be Revealed And This, I Know, Is A Common Condition Of People My Age. And Why All This Emphasis On Kissing And Telling? Kisses Are The Least Of It.

Argument Does Not Teach Children Or The Immature. Only Time And Experience Does That.

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There Is Only One Real Sin And That Is To Persuade Oneself That The Second Best Is Anything But Second Best.

All Sanity Depends On This: That It Should Be A Delight To Feel Heat Strike The Skin, A Delight To Stand Upright, Knowing The Bones Moving Easily Under The Flesh.

I Think I Am At The End Of A Certain Phase Of My Life. What I'm On The Lookout For Now Is The Unexpected, For Things That Come From Outside And That I Never Thought Might Happen. Sometimes You Have To Watch For Them So You Don't Automatically Say No To The New, Simply Because You're In The Habit Of Saying No To Everything That Comes Along.

America Can Be A Very Hysterical Country Intellectually And Very Puritanical, Too. You Probably Have Fun In Private, But To The Rest Of The World You Seem To Hate Fun - To Be Big On Agendas And Short On Spontaneity. The Image You Present Is One Of Appalling Conformity. The Thought Police Is What You Are Ruled By.

All I Do Is Give Interviews And Spend Time Being Photographed.

We Have Not Yet Developed A System Of Education That Is Not A System Of Indoctrination.

I Didn't Go To School Much, So I Taught Myself What I Knew From Reading.

My Mother Died Happily Of A Stroke In Her Seventies.

There's Always This Sense Of Incredulity That Writers Feel, Because They're Usually Living Flat And Ordinary Lives, Because They Have To.

When A Book's Pattern And The Shape Of Its Inner Life Is As Plain To The Reader As It Is To The Author -- Then Perhaps It Is Time To Throw The Book Aside, As Having Had Its Day, And Start Again On Something New.

Borrowing Is Not Much Better Than Begging; Just As Lending With Interest Is Not Much Better Than Stealing.

So Love Is Rest? The Cosy Corner? The Little Nook? Sometimes It Ought To Be. Sometimes It Is.

Music Attacks My Inner Ear Like An Antagonist, It's Not My World.

I Don't Think That The Feminist Movement Has Done Much For The Characters Of Women.

All My Friends' Mothers Were Appalling Women.

All One's Life As A Young Woman One Is On Show, A Focus Of Attention, People Notice You. You Set Yourself Up To Being Noticed And Admired. And Then, Not Expecting It, You Become Middle-aged And Anonymous.

Is There Any Delight As Great As The Child's Discovering Ability?

I Have To Conclude That Fiction Is Better At 'the Truth' Than A Factual Record.

I Never Stopped Reading.

Basic Facts Tend Always To Be Those Most Easily Overlooked.

I Think People Are Always Looking For Gurus. It's The Easiest Thing In The World To Become A Guru. It's Quite Terrifying. I Once Saw Something Fascinating Here In New York. It Must Have Been In The Early Seventies--guru Time. A Man Used To Go And Sit In Central Park, Wearing Elaborate Golden Robes. He Never Once Opened His Mouth, He Just Sat. He'd Appear At Lunchtime. People Appeared From Everywhere, Because He Was Obviously A Holy Man, And This Went On For Months. They Just Sat Around Him In Reverent Silence. Eventually He Got Fed Up With It And Left. Yes. It's As Easy As That.

And Then, Not Expecting It, You Become Middle-aged And Anonymous. No One Notices You. You Achieve A Wonderful Freedom. It Is A Positive Thing. You Can Move About Unnoticed And Invisible.

So A War Begins. Into A Peace-time Life, Comes An Announcement, A Threat. A Bomb Drops Somewhere, Potential Traitors Are Whisked Off Quietly To Prison. And For Some Time, Days, Months, A Year Perhaps, Life Has A Peace-time Quality, Into Which War-like Events Intrude. But When A War Has Been Going On For A Long Time, Life Is All War, Every Event Has The Quality Of War, Nothing Of Peace Remains.

The Freudians Describe The Conscious As A Small Lit Area, All White, And The Unconscious As A Great Dark Marsh Full Of Monsters. In Their View, The Monsters Reach Up, Grab You By The Ankles, And Try To Drag You Down.

When Young I Did My Best To Undo That Bit Of The British Empire I Found Myself In: That Is, Old Southern Rhodesia.

Knowing Cats, A Lifetime Of Cats, What Is Left Is A Sediment Of Sorrow Quite Different From That Due To Humans: Compounded Of Pain For Their Helplessness, Of Guilt On Behalf Of Us All.

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.

There Is Only One Way To Read, Which Is To Browse In Libraries And Bookshops, Picking Up Books That Attract You, Reading Only Those, Dropping Them When They Bore You, Skipping The Parts That Drag...

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.

An Interim Report - That Is What An Autobiography Is.

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But There Is No Doubt That To Attempt A Novel Of Ideas Is To Give Oneself A Handicap: The Parochialism Of Our Culture Is Intense. For Instance, Decade After Decade Bright Young Men And Women Emerge From Their Universities Able To Say Proudly: 'of Course I Know Nothing About German Literature.' It Is The Mode. The Victorians Knew Everything About German Literature, But Were Able With A Clear Conscience Not To Know Much About The French.

Little Tamar, Forget The Long Ago. We Are Here And We Are Now, And That Is All. We Are Making A New Start.

That Is What Learning Is. You Suddenly Understand Something You've Understood All Your Life, But In A New Way.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

I Don't Think That Women's Liberation Will Change Much Though -- Not Because There Is Anything Wrong With Their Aims, But Because It Is Already Clear That The Whole World Is Being Shaken Into A New Pattern By The Cataclysms We Are Living Through: Probably By The Time We Are Through, If We Do Get Through At All, The Aims Of Women's Liberation Will Look Very Small And Quaint.

Words. Words. I Play With Words, Hoping That Some Combination, Even A Chance Combination, Will Say What I Want.

If You Understand Something, You Don't Forgive It, You Are The Thing Itself: Forgiveness Is For What You Don't Understand.

Bed Is The Best Place For Reading, Thinking, Or Doing Nothing.

All Political Movements Are Like This - We Are In The Right, Everyone Else Is In The Wrong. The People On Our Own Side Who Disagree With Us Are Heretics, And They Start Becoming Enemies. With It Comes An Absolute Conviction Of Your Own Moral Superiority. There's Oversimplification In Everything, And A Terror Of Flexibility.

Why Were The Europeans Bothered About The Soviet Union At All? It Was Nothing To Do With Us. China Had Nothing To Do With Us. Why Were We Not Building, Without Reference To The Soviet Union, A Good Society In Our Own Countries? But No, We Were All - In One Way Or Another - Obsessed With The Bloody Soviet Union, Which Was A Disaster. What People Were Supporting Was Failure. And Continually Justifying It.

In University They Don't Tell You That The Greater Part Of The Law Is Learning To Tolerate Fools.

We Use Our Parents Like Recurring Dreams, To Be Entered Into When Needed.

There Are Many Feminists Who Work In The Media, And They Think That Feminism Is Very Important. It Is In Their Own Lives, But Mostly Feminism Has Had An Impact Among Privileged Women In The Advanced Western Countries. For The Most Part, It Hasn't Begun To Touch The Lives Of Poor And Working Women In The Third World, And That Distresses Me.

The Cleverest Trick Of The Devil Is That Nobody Believes In Him. It. Her. Well, We Have Been Very Stupid.

Sometimes I Pick Up A Book And I Say: Well, So You've Written It First, Have You? Good For You. O.k., Then I Won't Have To Write It.

I Was Filled With Such A Dangerous Delicious Intoxication That I Could Have Walked Straight Off The Steps Into The Air, Climbing On The Strength Of My Own Drunkeness Into The Stars. And The Intoxication, As I Knew Even Then, Was The Recklessness Of Infinite Possibility.

What A Luxury A Cat Is, The Moments Of Shocking And Startling Pleasure In A Day, The Feel Of The Beast, The Soft Sleekness Under Your Palm, The Warmth When You Wake On A Cold Night, The Grace And Charm Even In A Quite Ordinary Workaday Puss. Cat Walks Across Your Room, And In That Lonely Stalk You See Leopard Or Even Panther, Or It Turns Its Head To Acknowledge You And The Yellow Blaze Of Those Eyes Tells You What An Exotic Visitor You Have Here, In This Household Friend, The Cat Who Purrs As You Stroke, Or Rub His Chin, Or Scratch His Head.

I Was In New York When Clinton Was Elected The First Time, And Everyone I Knew Was In A State Of Mad Euphoria. I Wondered What Had Happened To My Hard-headed Friends? Almost Everyone I Knew Was Drunk On This Great White Hope. The Next Time I Was In New York, No One Had A Good Word To Say About Clinton, But Everyone Was In Love With Hillary. She Was The Last Word. It's All So Unreal. Of Course, It's No Different In England. Here Everyone Was Besotted With Tony Blair. He Was A New Face. Do People Never Learn?

Laughter Is By Definition Healthy.

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.

As Soon As I Got The Nobel Prize My Back Collapsed And I Was In Hospital.

I Don't Know Why I Still Find It So Hard To Accept That Words Are Faulty And By Their Very Nature Innacurate

I Spend A Good Deal Of Time Wondering How We Will Seem To The People Who Come After Us. This Is Not An Idle Interest, But A Deliberate Attempt To Strengthen The Power Of That "other Eye," Which We Can Use To Judge Ourselves.

I'm Sure That Everybody Feels A Kind Of Permanent Anguish About What's Going On In The World.

What Is Terrible Is That After Every One Of The Phases Of My Life Is Finished, I Am Left With No More Than Some Banal Commonplace That Everyone Knows.

Do You Know What People Really Want? Everyone, I Mean. Everybody In The World Is Thinking: I Wish There Was Just One Other Person I Could Really Talk To, Who Could Really Understand Me, Who'd Be Kind To Me. That's What People Really Want, If They're Telling The Truth.

No One's Noticed. So Much Is Destroyed, We Can't Be Bothered.

The World Is Only Tolerable Because Of The Empty Places In It...when The World's Filled Up, We'll Have To Get Hold Of A Star. Any Star. Venus, Or Mars. Get Hold Of It And Leave It Empty. Man Needs An Empty Space Somewhere For His Spirit To Rest In.

Women Often Get Dropped From Memory, And Then History.

The Golden Notebook For Some Reason Surprised People But It Was No More Than You Would Hear Women Say In Their Kitchens Every Day In Any Country... I Was Really Astounded That Some People Were Shocked.

Artists Are The Traditional Interpreters Of Dreams And Nightmares.

Time Is The River On Which The Leaves Of Our Thoughts Are Carried Into Oblivion.

I Would Not Be At All Surprised To Find Out . . . That The Dimensions Of Buildings Affect Us In Ways We Don't Guess.

Writers, And Particularly Female Writers, Have To Fight For The Conditions They Need To Work.

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.

Any Human Anywhere Will Blossom In A Hundred Unexpected Talents And Capacities Simply By Being Given The Opportunity To Do So.

September 11 Was Terrible, But If One Goes Back Over The History Of The Ira, What Happened To The Americans Wasn't That Terrible.

What Is Charm Then? The Free Giving Of A Grace, The Spending Of Something Given By Nature In Her Role Of Spendthrift ... Something Extra, Superfluous, Unnecessary, Essentially A Power Thrown Away.

How Boring These Emotions Are That We're Caught In And Can't Get Free Of, No Matter How Much We Want To.

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.

[the Golden Notebook] Was Not A Trumpet For Women's Liberation. It Described Many Female Emotions Of Aggression, Hostility, Resentment. It Put Them Into Print. Apparently What Many Women Were Thinking, Feeling, Experiencing, Came As A Great Surprise. Instantly A Lot Of Very Ancient Weapons Were Unleashed, The Main Ones, As Usual, Being On The Theme Of "she Is Unfeminine", "she Is A Man-hater".

In Fact I've Reached The Stage Where I Look At People And Say - He Or She, They Are Whole At All Because They've Chosen To Block Off At This Stage Or That. People Stay Sane By Blocking Off, By Limiting Themselves.

...we Try To Have Things Both Ways. We’ve Always Refused To Live By The Book And The Rule; But Then Why Start Worrying Because The World Doesn’t Treat Us By Rule?

Advice To Young Writers? Always The Same Advice: Learn To Trust Our Own Judgment, Learn Inner Independence, Learn To Trust That Time Will Sort The Good From The Bad– Including Your Own Bad.

We Spend Our Lives Fighting To Get People Very Slightly More Stupid Than Ourselves To Accept Truths That The Great Men Have Always Known.

Sometimes I Think What I Write Is Funny In Its Quiet Way.

Parents Should Leave Books Lying Around Marked "forbidden" If They Want Their Children To Read.

I've Won All The Prizes In Europe, Every Bloody One. I'm Delighted To Win Them All, The Whole Lot.

There Is A Great Line Of Women Stretching Out Behind You Into The Past, And You Have To Seek Them Out And Find Them In Yourself And Be Conscious Of Them.

Charity Has Always Been A Expression Of The Guilty Consciences Of A Ruling Class.

I Treasure Solitude. One Doesn't Have To Have Human Contact.

A Writer Falls In Love With An Idea And Gets Carried Away.

Falling In Love

There Is A Whole Generation Of Women And It Was As If Their Lives Came To A Stop When They Had Children. Most Of Them Got Pretty Neurotic - Because, I Think, Of The Contrast Between What They Were Taught At School They Were Capable Of Being And What Actually Happened To Them.

Novels Give You The Matrix Of Emotions, Give You The Flavour Of A Time In A Way Formal History Cannot.

The Freedom Of Women Was Achieved By Two Things: One, The Pill. Two... By Labour-saving Devices Like The Washing Machine. By Science, Not Feminism.

I'm Very Unhappy When I'm Not Writing.

Nonsense, It Was All Nonsense: This Whole Damned Outfit, With Its Committees, Its Conferences, Its Eternal Talk, Talk, Talk, Was A Great Con Trick; It Was A Mechanism To Earn A Few Hundred Men And Women Incredible Sums Of Money.

The Worst Superstition Is To Consider Our Own Tolerable.

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.

Thought Provoking

The Youth Do Not See The Old. They Are Not Programmed To See The Old, Who Are Cancelled, Negated, Wiped Out.

Thought Provoking

People Are Just Cannibals Unless They Leave Each Other Alone.

Golden Notebook

The White Man Has Settled Like A Locust Over Africa, And, Like The Locusts In Early Morning, Cannot Take Flight For The Heaviness Of The Dew On Their Wings. But The Dew That Weights The White Man Is The Money That He Makes From Our Labor.

I'll Be Pleased When I'm Dead. That Will Let Me Off Worrying About All These Wars.

I Always Hated Tony Blair, From The Beginning.

When A White Man In Africa By Accident Looks Into The Eyes Of A Native And Sees The Human Being (which It Is The Chief Preoccupation To Avoid), His Sense Of Guilt, Which He Denies, Fumes Up In Resentment And He Brings Down The Whip.

People Who Love Literature Have At Least Part Of Their Minds Immune From Indoctrination. If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

Small Things Amuse Small Minds.

What I Had That Others Didn't Was A Capacity For Sticking To It.

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.

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.

I Write Because I've Always Written, Can't Stop. I Am A Writing Animal. The Way A Silk Worm Is A Silk-producing Animal.

The Most Exciting Periods Of Literature Have Always Been Those When The Critics Were Great.

All Politicians Are Not The Same. I've Never Felt That Way. What Is The Same Is That Voters Get Very Excited About New Faces, Like Clinton And Blair - And They Have Unrealistic Expectations That The World Will Change Overnight. A Cynical Old Hand Like Myself Knows That It Won't.

Trust No Friend Without Faults, And Love A Woman, But No Angel.

I Don't Know Much About Creative Writing Programs. But They're Not Telling The Truth If They Don't Teach, One, That Writing Is Hard Work And, Two, That You Have To Give Up A Great Deal Of Life, Your Personal Life, To Be A Writer.

If A Fish Is The Movement Of Water Embodied, Given Shape, Then Cat Is A Diagram And Pattern Of Subtle Air.

The Difficulty Of Writing About Sex, For Women, Is That Sex Is Best When Not Thought About, Not Analysed.

Perhaps It Is A Fault Of The Species Who Thrive In Peace, Mutual Help, Aspirations For More Of The Same -- To Forget That Outside These Borders Dwell Very Different Types Of Mind, Feeding On Different Fuel.

You Have To Be Grown Up, Really Grown Up, Not Merely In Years, To Understand Your Parents.

What Of October, That Ambiguous Month, The Month Of Tension, The Unendurable Month?

What I Really Can't Stand About The Feminist Revolution Is That It Produced Some Of The Smuggest, Most Unselfcritical People The World Has Ever Seen. They Are Horrible.

Dreams Have Always Been My Friend, Full Of Information, Full Of Warnings.

For There Is Never Any Way To Go But In.

I'm Not One Of Those Writers That Sits Worrying About Posthumous Fame.

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.

You Are Taken, Shaken, By Moments When The Improbability Of Our Lives Comes Over You Like A Fever. Everything Is Remarkable, People, Living, Events Present Themselves To You With The Immediacy Of Players In Some Barbarous And Splendid Drama That It Seems We Are Part Of. You Have Been Given New Eyes.

Man Who Is He? Too Bad, To Be The Work Of God: Too Good For The Work Of Chance!

The Whole Process Of Writing Is A Setting At A Distance. That Is The Value Of It - To The Writer, And To The People Who Read The Results Of This Process, Which Takes The Raw, The Individual, The Uncriticized, The Unexamined, Into The Realm Of The General.

Most Novels, If They Are Successful At All, Are Original In The Sense That They Report The Existence Of An Area Of Society, A Type Of Person, Not Yet Admitted To The General Literate Consciousness.

I Have A Daughter And Two Grand-daughters And A Great Grandson In Africa, In Cape Town.

I'm Always Astounded At The Way We Automatically Look At What Divides And Separates Us. We Never Look At What People Have In Common. If You See It, Black And White People, Both Sides Look To See The Differences, They Don't Look At What They Have Together. Men And Women, And Old And Young, And So On. And This Is A Disease Of The Mind, The Way I See It. Because In Actual Fact, Men And Women Have Much More In Common Than They Are Separated.

Black And White

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.

A Public Library Is The Most Democratic Thing In The World. What Can Be Found There Has Undone Dictators And Tyrants: Demagogues Can Persecute Writers And Tell Them What To Write As Much As They Like, But They Cannot Vanish What Has Been Written In The Past, Though They Try Often Enough...people Who Love Literature Have At Least Part Of Their Minds Immune From Indoctrination. If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

Hitler Admired Stalin, Quite Properly Seeing Himself As A Mere Infant In Crime Compared To His Great Exemplar.

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.

There Is No Doubt Fiction Makes A Better Job Of The Truth.

What Is A Hero Without Love For Mankind.

None Of You [men] Ask For Anything - Except Everything, But Just For So Long As You Need It.

I'm Going To Make The Obvious Point That Maybe The Word Neurotic Means The Condition Of Being Highly Conscious And Developed. The Essence Of Neurosis Is Conflict. But The Essence Of Living Now, Fully, Not Blocking Off To What Goes On, Is Conflict. In Fact I've Reached The Stage Where I Look At People And Say - He Or She, They Are Whole At All Because They've Chosen To Block Off At This Stage Or That. People Stay Sane By Blocking Off, By Limiting Themselves.

A Woman Without A Man Cannot Meet A Man, Any Man, Of Any Age, Without Thinking, Even If It's For A Half-second, 'perhaps This Is The Man.

I Am Increasingly Afflicted By Vertigo Where Words Mean Nothing

Words Mean Nothing

Don't Read A Book Out Of Its Right Time For You.

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.

But It Isn't Only The Terror Everywhere, And The Fear Of Being Conscious Of It, That Freezes People. It's More Than That. People Know They Are In A Society Dead Or Dying. They Are Refusing Emotion Because At The End Of Very Emotion Are Property, Money, Power. They Work And Despise Their Work, And So Freeze Themselves. They Love But Know That It's A Half- Love Or A Twisted Love, And So They Freeze Themselves.

All Things Come Alike To All; There Is One Event To The Righteous, And To The Wicked; To The Good And To The Clean, And To The Unclean; To Him That Sacrificeth, And To Him That Sacrificeth Not.

Envy Has Always Hidden Behind Moral Indignation.

I Have Kept Diaries, Of Course, But They Can't Be Read For Quite A Long Time. I'm Always Curious About People Who Are Fascinated By Writers' Lives. It Seems To Me That We're Always In Our Books, Quite Nakedly. I Wonder, Too, Does The Private Life Really Matter? Who Cares What Is Known About You And What Isn't? Even When You Make Public Something That's Been Private, Most People Don't Get It - Not Unless They're The Same Generation And Have Gone Through More Or Less The Same Experiences. So, In A Sense, We're All Private, By Definition.

Time And Distance From The First And Second World Wars Doesn't Seem To Lessen Their Horrors.

Anna, There's Something Very Arrogant About Insisting On The Right To Be Right.

Writers Brought Up In Africa Have Many Advantages - Being At The Center Of A Modern Battlefield; Part Of A Society In Rapid, Dramatic Change. But In A Long Run It Can Also Be A Handicap: To Wake Up Every Morning With One's Eyes On A Fresh Evidence Of Inhumanity; To Be Reminded Twenty Times A Day Of Injustice, And Always The Same Brand Of It, Can Be Limiting.

I Do Not Think That Marriage Is One Of My Talents. I've Been Much Happier Unmarried Than Married.

We Do Not Know Which Of Our Silver Products Will Be Judged As Gold By Our Successors, Nor Does It Matter.

The Point Is, That The Function Of The Novel Seems To Be Changing; It Has Become An Outpost Of Journalism; We Read Novels For Information About Areas Of Life We Don't Know - Nigeria, South Africa, The American Army, A Coal-mining Village, Coteries In Chelsea, Etc. We Read To Find Out What Is Going On. One Novel In Five Hundred Or A Thousand Has The Quality A Novel Should Have To Make It A Novel - The Quality Of Philosophy.

Wisdom Is Better Than Weapons Of War; But One Sinner Destroyeth Much Good.

It Is Terrible To Destroy A Person's Picture Of Himself In The Interests Of Truth Or Some Other Abstraction.

The Words Of A Wise Man's Mouth Are Gracious; But The Lips Of A Fool Will Swallow Up Himself.

We Are Several People Fitted Inside Each Other. Chinese Boxes. Our Bodies Are The Outside Box. Or The Inside One If You Like.

Writers Do Not Come Out Of Houses Without Books.

I'm Always Astounded At The Way We Automatically Look At What Divides And Separates Us. We Never Look At What People Have In Common.

You Have To Give Up A Great Deal Of Life, Your Personal Life, To Be A Writer.

Creative Writers

Creative Writing

When I Started, There Were No Big Interviews, No Television, No Profiles And All That. The Publishers Were Quite Shockingly Uncommercial, But They Did Look After Their Writers.

I Don't Think In Terms Of Optimism And Pessimism When Writing A Story. I Am Telling A Story.

You Only Learn To Be A Better Writer By Actually Writing.

Some Books Are Not Read In The Right Way Because They Have Skipped A Stage Of Opinion, Assume A Crystallization Of Information In Society Which Has Not Yet Taken Place.

Cats Mean Kittens, Plentiful And Frequent.

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Warren E. Burger

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