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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.

-Doris Lessing

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Sleep Is Harder To

Doris Lessing

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

Nicknames Are Potent Ways Of Cutting People Down To Size.

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

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.

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.

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.

Writers Do Not Come Out Of Houses Without Books.

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.

Every Spendthrift Passion Has Its Attendant Courtiers.

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

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.

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.

I Never Stopped Reading.

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.

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.

Whenever I Met Anyone Who Knew Anything, I Would Bore Them Stiff Until They Told Me What They Knew.

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.

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.

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

Black And White

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.

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

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.

For There Is Never Any Way To Go But In.

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

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.

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

I've Always Disliked Words Like Inspiration. Writing Is Probably Like A Scientist Thinking About Some Scientific Problem, Or An Engineer About An Engineering Problem.

In Times Of War, As Everyone Knows, Who Has Lived Through One, Or Talked To Soldiers When They Are Allowing Themselves To Remember The Truth, And Not The Sentimentalities With Which We All Shield Ourselves From The Horrors Of Which We Are Capable ... In Times Of War We Revert, As A Species, To The Past, And Are Permitted To Be Brutal And Cruel. It Is For This Reason, And Of Course Others, That A Great Many People Enjoy War. But This Is One Of The Facts About War That Is Not Often Talked About.

We Are All Creatures Of The Stars.

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.

Some People Obtain Fame, Others Deserve 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. 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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

You Should Write, First Of All, To Please Yourself. You Shouldn't Care A Damn About Anybody Else At All. But Writing Can't Be A Way Of Life - The Important Part Of Writing Is Living. You Have To Live In Such A Way That Your Writing Emerges From It.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What Matters Most Is That We Learn From Living.

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 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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

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.

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

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

A Story Is How We Construct Our Experiences.

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

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.

Men Are Restless, Adventurous. Women Are Conservative - Despite What Current Ideology Says.

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

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

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

In Shanghai, I Saw Great Contrasts. On One Street There Would Be Impressive Shops Selling Copies Of The Latest Word In Glamorous European Fashion, And Around The Corner On A Back Street There Were Poor Families Crammed Into One Room With A Naked Light Bulb. One Evening I Heard A Chinese Family Singing "happy Birthday." It Was Weird. You Would Have Thought That They'd Have Their Own Happy Birthday Song. Every Dominant Society In The World - Whether It's French Or British Or American - Imposes Its Culture On Less Developed Societies.

Small Things Amuse Small Minds.

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.

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 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.

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.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Literature Is Analysis After The Event.

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.

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

For Women Like Me, Integrity Isn't Chastity, It Isn't Fidelity, It Isn't Any Of The Old Words. Integrity Is The Orgasm. That Is Something I Haven't Any Control Over.

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

Think For Yourself

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

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?"

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

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

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.

Better Counsel Comes Overnight.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Always, In Epochs When The Languages And Dialects Of A Culture Have Become Outstripped By Development Of A Practical Sort, These Languages Become Repetitive, Formalised -- And Ridiculous. Phrases, Words, Associations Of Sentences Spin Themselves Out Automatically, But Have No Effect: They Have Lost Their Power, Their Energy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Every Child Has The Capacity To Be Everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Thought Provoking

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

Artists Are The Traditional Interpreters Of Dreams And Nightmares.

What Is A Hero Without Love For Mankind.

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

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

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.

Women Often Get Dropped From Memory, And Then History.

My Father Was In The First World War.

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

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

Cats Mean Kittens, Plentiful And Frequent.

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 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.

...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?

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 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.

Basic Facts Tend Always To Be Those Most Easily Overlooked.

People Don't Mind Immoral Messages. They Don't Mind Art Which Says That Murder Is Good, Cruelty Is Good, Sex For Sex's Sake Is Good. They Like It, Provided The Message Is Wrapped Up A Little. And They Like Messages Saying That Murder Is Bad, Cruelty Is Bad, And Love Is Love Is Love Is Love. What They Can't Stand Is To Be Told It All Doesn't Matter, They Can't Stand Formlessness.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

All My Friends' Mothers Were Appalling Women.

Does Political Correctness Have A Good Side? Yes, It Does, For It Makes Us Re-examine Attitudes, And That Is Always Useful. The Trouble Is That, With All Popular Movements, The Lunatic Fringe So Quickly Ceases To Be A Fringe; The Tail Begins To Wag The Dog. For Every Woman Or Man Who Is Quietly And Sensibly Using The Idea To Examine Our Assumptions, There Are Twenty Rabble-rousers Whose Real Motive Is Desire For Power Over Others. The Fact That They See Themselves As Antiracists Or Feminists Or Whatever Does Not Make Them Any Less Rabble-rousers.

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.

When There's A War, People Get Married.

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.

My Mother Died Happily Of A Stroke In Her Seventies.

Women Are Slaves To Their Beauty.

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

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

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

...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.

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.

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

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

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William C. Bryant

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