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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.

-Doris Lessing

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I Think I Am

Doris Lessing

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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.

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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.

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

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.

I Hated The 1960's Feminists," She Says. "they Were Dogmatists, You See. In Comes Ideology, And Out Goes Common Sense. This Is My Experience Of Life.

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

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.

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

As The Fishes That Are Taken In An Evil Net, And As The Birds That Are Caught In The Snare; So Are The Sons Of Men Snared In Evil Time, When It Falleth Suddenly Upon Them.

Artists Are The Traditional Interpreters Of Dreams And Nightmares.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It Is Not Always Possible To Know, When You Make A Note Of An Event, Or A State Of Mind, How This May Strike Someone Perhaps Ten Thousand Years Later.

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

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.

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

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.

Bad Luck For Both Of Us, We Are Both Boulder-pushers.

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...

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.

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

Creative Writers

Creative Writing

Anna Was Saying To Herself: Why Do I Always Have This Awful Need To Make Other People See Things As I Do? It's Childish, Why Should They? What It Amounts To Is That I'm Scared Of Being Alone In What I Feel.

It Has Become A Kind Of Religion That You Can't Criticise Because Then You Become A Traitor To The Great Cause, Which I Am Not. It Is Time We Began To Ask Who Are These Women Who Continually Rubbish Men. The Most Stupid, Ill-educated And Nasty Woman Can Rubbish The Nicest, Kindest And Most Intelligent Man And No One Protests ... Men Seem To Be So Cowed That They Can't Fight Back, And It Is Time They Did.

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

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.

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.

A Foolhardy Lot, We Accepted It All, As We Always Do, Never Asked: "what Is Going To Happen To Us Now, With This Invention Of Print?" In The Same Way, We Never Thought To Ask, "how Will Our Lives, Our Way Of Thinking, Be Changed By The Internet, Which Has Seduced A Whole Generation With Its Inanities So That Even Quite Reasonable People Will Confess That, Once They Are Hooked, It Is Hard To Cut Free, And They May Find A Whole Day Has Passed In Blogging Etc?"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Smell Of Manure, Of Sun On Foliage, Of Evaporating Water, Rose To My Head; Two Steps Farther, And I Could Look Down Into The Vegetable Garden Enclosed Within Its Tall Pale Of Reeds - Rich Chocolate Earth Studded Emerald Green, Frothed With The White Of Cauliflowers, Jeweled With The Purple Globes Of Eggplant And The Scarlet Wealth Of Tomatoes.

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.

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

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

When You Look At My Life, You Can Go Back To The Late 1930s, What I Saw Was, First Of All, Hitler, He Was Going To Live Forever. Mussolini Was In For 10,000 Years. You Had The Soviet Union, Which Was, By Definition, Going To Last Forever. There Was The British Empire -- Nobody Imagined It Could Come To An End. So Why Should One Believe In Any Kind Of Permanence?

...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?

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

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.

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.

If What We Think Now Is Different From What We Thought Then, We Can Take It For Granted That What We Think In A Year Will Be Different Again.

My Father Was In The First World War.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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. I'm Constantly Changing My Perspective On My Own Life. I See The Past Differently, And That's A Wonderful Thing.

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

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.

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.

At No Time, Anywhere, Was The Population Of A Country Told The Truth: Facts About Events Trickled Into General Consciousness Much Later, If Ever.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

I Hate To Sound Clichéd, But I Do See Life As A Journey. How Else Can You See It?

Curse Not The King, No Not In Thy Thought; And Curse Not The Rich In Thy Bedchamber, For A Bird Of The Air Shall Carry The Voice, And That Which Hath Wings Shall Tell The Matter.

I Never Stopped Reading.

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

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.

The Worst Superstition Is To Consider Our Own Tolerable.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

[on Her Mother:] I Was In Nervous Flight From Her Ever Since I Can Remember Anything, And From The Age Of Fourteen I Set Myself Obdurately Against Her In A Kind Of Inner Emigration From Everything She Represented. Girls Do Have To Grow Up, But Has This Battle Always Been So Implacable?

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.

Every Spendthrift Passion Has Its Attendant Courtiers.

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.

One Novel In Five Hundred Or A Thousand Has The Quality A Novel Should Have To Make It A Novel -- The Quality Of Philosophy.

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.

For There Is Never Any Way To Go But In.

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

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.

...or Like An Old Friend One Has Known Too Well And Doesn't Want To See.

There Are Two Kinds Of Humanity, Those Who Dream And Those Who Don't, And Both Tend To Despise, Or To Tolerate, The Other.

Living In A Small Town Anywhere Means Preserving One's Self Behind A Mask.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

What Matters Most Is That We Learn From Living.

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

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

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

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

Whatever You're Meant To Do, Do It Now. The Conditions Are Always Impossible.

The Art Of Living In A Small Town Is One Of The Most Difficult To Acquire.

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

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

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.

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

Once I Read Autobiography As What The Writer Thought About His Or Her Life. Now I Think, 'this Is What They Thought At That Time'. An Interim Report - That Is What An Autobiography Is.

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.'

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.

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.

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

It Is Quite Easy To Remark The Absurdities And Contradictions Of A Country's Social System From Outside Its Borders, But Very Difficult If One Has Been Brought Up In It.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Intelligence Forbids Tears.

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

Thought Provoking

Pleasure Resorts Are Like Film Stars And Royalty... Embarrassed By The Figures They Cut In The Fantasies Of People Who Have Never Met Them.

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.

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.

Africa Gives You The Knowledge That Man Is A Small Creature, Among Other Creatures, In A Large Landscape.

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.

I Do Not Think Writers Or Anybody Would 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.

Envy Has Always Hidden Behind Moral Indignation.

Sometimes I Dislike Women, I Dislike Us All, Because Of Our Capacity For Not-thinking When It Suits Us; We Choose Not To Think When We Are Reaching Our For Happiness.

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

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

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

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 Public Library Is The Most Democratic Thing In The World. What Can Be Found There Has Undone Dictators And Tyrants.

Mostly Getting Old Is Boring. I Hate The Stiffness In The Bones. I Was Physically Arrogant For Years. I Don't Like It Now That I Have Difficulty Getting Around. But A Certain Equanimity Sets In, A Certain Detachment. Things Seem Less Desperately Important Than They Once Did, And That's A Pleasure.

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

You Can't Be A Red If You're Married To A Civil Servant.

...she Thinks, For The Hundredth Time, That In Their Emotional Life All These Intelligent Men Use A Level So Much Lower Than Anything They Use For Work, That They Might Be Different Creatures.

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.

I Stood Looking Down Out Of The Window. The Street Seemed Miles Down. Suddenly I Felt As If I'd Flung Myself Out Of The Window. I Could See Myself Lying On The Pavement. Then I Seemed To Be Standing By The Body On The Pavement. I Was Two People. Blood And Brains Were Scattered Everywhere. I Knelt Down And Began Licking Up The Blood And Brains

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

Small Things Amuse Small Minds.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I Am So Happy To Be Communicating With People On This Newest Of New Wavelengths Which To Some Older People Must Seem Like A Kind Of Magic.

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.

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

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.

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

Black And White

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I Always Hated Tony Blair, From The Beginning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What Is A Hero Without Love For Mankind.

Cats Mean Kittens, Plentiful And Frequent.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We Are All Creatures Of The Stars And Their Forces, They Make Us, We Make Them, We Are Part Of A Dance From Which We By No Means And Not Ever May Consider Ourselves Separate.

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.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

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.

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.

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