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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.

-Doris Lessing

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This Is A Time

Doris Lessing

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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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Better Counsel Comes Overnight.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Think For Yourself

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

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

Small Things Amuse Small Minds.

Every Child Has The Capacity To Be Everything.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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

Intelligence Forbids Tears.

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

Creative Writers

Creative Writing

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

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.

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.

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

What Is A Hero Without Love For Mankind.

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

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

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.

My Mother Died Happily Of A Stroke In Her Seventies.

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.

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.

Women Often Get Dropped From Memory, And Then History.

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

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.

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.

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

Men Are Unwise And Curiously Planned.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Artists Are The Traditional Interpreters Of Dreams And Nightmares.

The Worst Superstition Is To Consider Our Own Tolerable.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I 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.

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

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.

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.'

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

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

My Father Was In The First World War.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

The Nobel Prize Is Run By A Self-perpetuated Committee. They Vote For Themselves And Get The World's Publishing Industry To Jump To Their Tune.

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

Some People Obtain Fame, Others Deserve It.

All My Friends' Mothers Were Appalling Women.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Every Spendthrift Passion Has Its Attendant Courtiers.

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.

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.

Literature Is Analysis After The Event.

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

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.

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

Black And White

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Laughter Is By Definition Healthy.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Often The Mass Emotions Are Those Which Seem The Noblest, Best And Most Beautiful. And Yet, Inside A Year, Five Years, A Decade, Five Decades, People Will Be Asking, "how Could You Have Believed That?" Because Events Will Have Taken Place That Will Have Banished The Said Mass Emotions To The Dustbin Of History.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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

We Are All Creatures Of The Stars.

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'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

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

[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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Thought Provoking

...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.

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

Nicknames Are Potent Ways Of Cutting People Down To Size.

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.

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 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.

Writers Do Not Come Out Of Houses Without Books.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Falling In Love

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

An Interim Report - That Is What An Autobiography Is.

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.

Cats Mean Kittens, Plentiful And Frequent.

Basic Facts Tend Always To Be Those Most Easily Overlooked.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

People Are Just Cannibals Unless They Leave Each Other Alone.

Golden Notebook

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.

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.

For There Is Never Any Way To Go But In.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

When There's A War, People Get Married.

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

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

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.

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