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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.

-Doris Lessing

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But There Is No

Doris Lessing

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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.

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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.

Free Women," Said Anna, Wryly. She Added, With An Anger New To Molly, So That She Earned Another Quick Scrutinizing Glance From Her Friend: "they Still Define Us In Terms Of Relationships With Men, Even The Best Of Them.

Women Are The Cowards They Are Because They Have Been Semi-slaves For So Long. The Number Of Women Prepared To Stand Up For What They Really Think, Feel, Experience, With A Man They Are In Love With Is Still Very Small.

The Kitten Was Six Weeks Old. It Was Enchanting, A Delicate Fairy-tale Cat, Whose Siamese Genes Showed In The Shape Of The Face, Ears, Tail, And The Subtle Lines Of Its Body. [...] She Sat, A Tiny Thing, In The Middle Of A Yellow Carpet, Surrounded By Five Worshipppers, Not At All Afraid Of Us. Then She Stalked Around That Floor Of The House, Inspecting Every Inch Of It, Climbed Up On To My Bed, Crept Under The Fold Of A Sheet, And Was At Home.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

This Is A Time When It Is Frightening To Be Alive, When It Is Hard To Think Of Human Beings As Rational Creatures. Everywhere We Look We See Brutality, Stupidity, Until It Seems That There Is Nothing Else To Be Seen But That--a Descent Into Barbarism, Everywhere, Which We Are Unable To Check. But I Think That While It Is True There Is A General Worsening, It Is Precisely Because Things Are So Frightening We Become Hypnotized, And Do Not Notice--or If We Notice, Belittle--equally Strong Forces On The Other Side, The Forces, In Short, Of Reason, Sanity And Civilization.

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

When The Print Revolution Occurred 400 Years Ago, Human Beings Lost A Certain Mental Capacity, Including A Sense Of Memory. In Africa Today, You Meet People Who Still Carry Everything In Their Heads, The Way We Used To. We Rely On Telephone Books, Address Books. We Have To Look Up Everything.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All My Friends' Mothers Were Appalling Women.

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.

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

This Is An Inevitable And Easily Recognizable Stage In Every Revolutionary Movement: Reformers Must Expect To Be Disowned By Those Who Are Only Too Happy To Enjoy What Has Been Won For Them.

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

Falling In Love

Every Spendthrift Passion Has Its Attendant Courtiers.

Mother's Room, And Mother's Need For Privacy Become A Valuable Lesson In Respect For Other People's Rights.

What Women Will Say To Other Women Grumbling In Their Kitchens And Complaining And Gossiping Or What They Make Clear In Their Masochism Is Often The Last Thing They Will Say Aloud - A Man May Overhear. Women Are The Cowards They Are Because They Have Been Semi-slaves For So Long.

On The News Two Dozen Events Of Fantastically Different Importance Are Announced In Exactly The Same Tone Of Voice. The Voice Doesn't Discriminate Between A Divorce, A Horse Race, A War In The Middle East.

Envy Has Always Hidden Behind Moral Indignation.

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.

Some People Obtain Fame, Others Deserve It.

What Society Doesn't Realize Is That In The Past, Ordinary People Respected Learning. They Respected Books, And They Don't Now, Or Not Very Much. That Whole Respect For Serious Literature And Learning Has Disappeared.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Think For Yourself

For Real Pleasure A Pleasure Resort Should Have No One In It But Its Legitimate Inhabitants, Oneself, And Perhaps One's Friends.

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.

I Wasn't An Active Feminist In The '60s, Never Have Been.

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.

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

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

Our Society Is Dependent On Some Precarious Mechanisms, And They Are Very Dicey. They Can Easily Collapse.

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.

One Certainty We All Accept Is The Condition Of Being Uncertain And Insecure.

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

I Often Feel Like A Dinosaur. I Don't Get The Technology Thing At All. I Was On The Internet Not Long Ago For Barnes And Noble, And People Were Ringing Up From All Over The World - Australia, Canada, France. I Experienced It As An Informal Chat, Which Was Pleasant, But I Couldn't Quite Take It In. It Had A Strong Element Of Unreality. I Can't Be Bothered To Switch To A Computer At My Age, Though I Might Get Along With E-mail, Which Sounds Appealing.

Laughter Is By Definition Healthy.

Space Or Science Fiction Has Become A Dialect For Our Time.

The Automatic Reaction Of Practically Any Young Person Is, At Once, Against Authority. That, I Think, Began In The First World War Because Of The Trenches, And The Incompetence Of The People On All Fronts.

What Of Course I Would Like To Be Writing Is The Story Of The Red And White Dwarves And Their Remembering Mirror, Their Space Rocket (powered By Anti-gravity), Their Attendant Entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, And Muon, And The Charmed Quarks And The Coloured Quarks. But We Can't All Be Physicists.

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

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

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

Everyone Knows That Where There Is Something That Is Capable Of Giving Profit, Then Exploited It Will Be.

If She Had Been Left Alone She Would Have Gone On, In Her Own Way, Enjoying Herself Thoroughly, Until People Found One Day That She Had Turned Imperceptibly Into One Of Those Women Who Have Become Old Without Ever Having Been Middle Aged: A Little Withered, A Little Acid, Hard As Nails, Sentimentally Kindhearted, And Addicted To Religion Or Small Dogs.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He Destroyed In Her The Knowing, Doubting, Sophisticated Ella, And Again And Again He Put Her Intelligence To Sleep, And With Her Willing Connivance, So That She Floated Darkly On Her Love For Him, On Her Naivety, Which Is Another Word For A Spontaneous Creative Faith. And When His Own Distrust Of Himself Destroyed This Woman-in-love, So That She Began Thinking, She Would Fight To Return To Naivety.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Think Kids Ought To Travel. I Think It's Very Good To Carry Kids Around. It's Good For Them. Of Course It's Tough On The Parents.

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 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 Hate Iran. I Hate The Iranian Government. It's A Cruel And Evil Government.

We, As A Society, Can't Tolerate Very Much Difference.

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.

I Always Hated Tony Blair, From The Beginning.

I Woke Up One Morning, And I Couldn't Move My Arm. It Was The Oddest Thing, The Paralysis. I Called Up A Friend And Said, "i Think I've Had A Stroke," And, In Fact, That's What My Doctor Told Me. It Wasn't Terrible, But It Was Enough To Scare Me. Now I Think About Death All The Time. I Have My Death Arm, My Right Arm.

London Has Changed Enormously And So Have The English In The Past Decade. They're More Like Americans And More Like Europeans, Too. They're Always Eating Out, And When They're At Home They Don't Cook The Way They Did Ten Years Ago. They're All Sitting Around In Cafés, Like The Continentals, Drinking Coffee And Chattering And Watching The World Go By.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This World Is Run By People Who Know How To Do Things. They Know How Things Work. They Are Equipped. Up There, There's A Layer Of People Who Run Everything. But We - We're Just Peasants. We Don't Understand What's Going On, And We Can't Do Anything.

Capable People Do Not Understand Incapacity; Clever People Do Not Understand Stupidity.

When You're Young You Think That You're Going To Sail Into A Lovely Lake Of Quietude And Peace. This Is Profoundly Untrue.

[some People Think] That Storytelling Is Telling Jokes. So They Have To Be Discouraged! Then Others Think That Storytelling-is Like An Encounter Group . . .

The Worst Superstition Is To Consider Our Own Tolerable.

For The Last Third Of Life There Remains Only Work. It Alone Is Always Stimulating, Rejuvenating, Exciting And Satisfying.

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.

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

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.

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

There Was A Time When Young People Respected Learning And Literature And Now They Don't.

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.

The Critics Slap Labels On You And Then Expect You To Talk Inside Their Terms.

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.

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

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

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.

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

You Remember With What You Are At The Time You Are Remembering.

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

Very Few People Really Care About Freedom, About Liberty, About The Truth, Very Few. Very Few People Have Guts, The Kind Of Guts On Which A Real Democracy Has To Depend. Without People With That Sort Of Guts A Free Society Dies Or Cannot Be Born.

Democracies Have

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.

And It Does No Harm To Repeat, As Often As You Can, 'without Me The Literary Industry Would Not Exist: The Publishers, The Agents, The Sub-agents, The Sub-sub-agents, The Accountants, The Libel Lawyers, The Departments Of Literature, The Professors, The Theses, The Books Of Criticism, The Reviewers, The Book Pages- All This Vast And Proliferating Edifice Is Because Of This Small, Patronized, Put-down And Underpaid Person.'

The Old Watch The Young With Anguish, Pain, Fear. Above All What Each Has Learned Is What Things Cost, What Has To Be Paid.

You Know, Whenever Women Make Imaginary Female Kingdoms In Literature, They Are Always Very Permissive, To Use The Jargon Word, And Easy And Generous And Self-indulgent, Like The Relationships Between Women When There Are No Men Around. They Make Each Other Presents, And They Have Little Feasts, And Nobody Punishes Anyone Else. This Is The Female Way Of Going Along When There Are No Men About Or When Men Are Not In The Ascendant.

Women Have An Extraordinary Ability To Withdraw From The Sexual Relationship, To Immunize Themselves Against It, In Such A Way That Their Men Can Be Left Feeling Let Down And Insulted Without Having Anything Tangible To Complain Of.

Advice To Young Writers? Always The Same Advice: Learn To Trust Our Own Judgment.

Women Are Slaves To Their Beauty.

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

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

Better Counsel Comes Overnight.

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

The Storyteller Is Deep Inside Everyone Of Us. The Story-maker Is Always With Us. Let Us Suppose Our World Is Attacked By War, By The Horrors That We All Of Us Easily Imagine. Let Us Suppose Floods Wash Through Our Cities, The Seas Rise . . . But The Storyteller Will Be There, For It Is Our Imaginations Which Shape Us, Keep Us, Create Us - For Good And For Ill. It Is Our Stories That Will Recreate Us, When We Are Torn, Hurt, Even Destroyed. It Is The Storyteller, The Dream-maker, The Myth-maker, That Is Our Phoenix, That Represents Us At Our Best, And At Our Most Creative.

It Is Our Stories That Will Recreate Us, When We Are Torn, Hurt, Even Destroyed. It Is The Storyteller, The Dream-maker, The Myth-maker, That Is Our Phoenix, That Represents Us At Our Best, And At Our Most Creative.

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

I Never Stopped Reading.

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.

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

Men Are Unwise And Curiously Planned.

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.

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

Think Wrongly, If You Please, But In All Cases Think For Yourself.

It Is My Belief...that The Talents Every Child Has, Regardless Of His Official 'i.q,' Could Stay With Him Through Life, To Enrich Him And Everybody Else, If These Talents Were Not Regarded As Commodities With A Value In The Success-stakes.

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

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.

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.

For With My Intuition I Knew That This Man Was Repeating A Pattern Over And Over Again: Courting A Woman With His Intelligence And Sympathy, Claiming Her Emotionally; Then, When She Began To Claim In Return, Running Away. And The Better A Woman Was, The Sooner He Would Begin To Run. I Knew This With My Intuition, And Yet I Sat There In My Dark Room, Looking At The Hazed Wet Brilliance Of The Purple London Night Sky, Longing With My Whole Being.

I Wonder Why Do Wars Suddenly Start And Suddenly Stop, And Why Do We Brits And You Americans Get Involved In Some Of Them And Not In Others? Is It Possible That The Arms Manufacturers Quietly Foment Wars Without Us Knowing? Dropping Bombs Is A Very Profitable Business For Them. Gore Vidal Was Talking About This The Other Day, And He Made A Lot Of Sense. Whenever American Policy Seems Inscrutable, He Said, Remember The Military-industrial Complex. He's The One Who Should Have Been President.

Growing Up Is, After All, Only The Understanding That One's Unique And Incredible Experience Is What Every One Shares.

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

A Story Is How We Construct Our Experiences.

A Simple Grateful Thought Turned Heavenwards Is The Most Perfect Prayer.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Recently, The Science Fiction Writer Arthur C. Clarke Talked About The Ways The Lives Of Human Beings Will Be Changed In The Next Century. At Least Half Of Them I Didn't Understand At All, Though I'm Sure That Kids Today Would Know Exactly What He Meant. I'm Somewhere In The Past. I Do Think, However, That Our Brains Have Been Damaged By Technology. I Meet Kids Who Don't Seem To Be Capable Of Reading A Long Sentence, Much Less A Long Book.

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

Creative Writers

Creative Writing

I Think A Writer's Job Is To Provoke Questions. I Like To Think That If Someone's Read A Book Of Mine, They've Had - I Don't Know What - The Literary Equivalent Of A Shower. Something That Would Start Them Thinking In A Slightly Different Way Perhaps. That's What I Think Writers Are For. This Is What Our Function Is.

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.

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!

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.

Small Things Amuse Small Minds.

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.

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.

[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".

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

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

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

It Usually Takes Me A Year To Do A Book. A Year Or Eighteen Months.

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.

What I Did Have, Which Others Perhaps Didn't, Was A Capacity For Sticking At It, Which Really Is The Point, Not The Talent At All. You Have To Stick At It.

Ideally, What Should Be Said To Every Child, Repeatedly, Throughout His Or Her School Life Is Something Like This: "you Are In The Process Of Being Indoctrinated. We Have Not Yet Evolved A System Of Education That Is Not A System Of Indoctrination. We Are Sorry, But It Is The Best We Can Do."

As You Get Older, You Don't Get Wiser. You Get Irritable.

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.

It Is The Mark Of Great People To Treat Trifles As Trifles And Important Matters As Important.

I Am A Person Who Continually Destroys The Possibilities Of A Future Because Of The Numbers Of Alternative Viewpoints I Can Focus On The Present.

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

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.

I Am Interested Only In Stretching Myself, On Living As Fully As I Can.

When I Was Starting Out, Science Fiction Was A Little Genre Over There, Which Only A Few People Read. But Now -- Where Are You Going To Put, For Example, Salman Rushdie? Or Any Of The South American Writers? Most People Get By Calling Them Magical Realists.

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.

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

The Human Community Is Evolving... . We Can Survive Anything You Care To Mention. We Are Supremely Equipped To Survive, To Adapt And Even In The Long Run To Start Thinking.

Women Often Get Dropped From Memory, And Then History.

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.

... If You Have Nothing, You Are Free To Choose Among Dreams And Fantasies.

Every Child Has The Capacity To Be Everything.

What The Feminists Want Of Me Is Something They Haven't Examined Because It Comes From Religion. They Want Me To Bear Witness.

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

Things Are Not Quite So Simple Always As Black And White.

Black And White

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.

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.

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.

The First Casualty In Any War Is The Truth. In World War Ii, I Was Part Of A Group Of People Who Used To Meet Once A Week With The Sole Purpose Of Analyzing The News And Trying To Work Out What We Weren't Being Told. We Thought That We Were Clever, But We Had Absolutely No Idea What Was Really Going On. It Was Only Years Later That We Learned The True Story.

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

Basic Facts Tend Always To Be Those Most Easily Overlooked.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

There Is Nothing More Boring For An Intelligent Woman Than To Spend Endless Amounts Of Time With Small Children.

Writers Do Not Come Out Of Houses Without Books.

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.

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

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.

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?

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