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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.

-Doris Lessing

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What A Luxury A

Doris Lessing

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

My Father Was In The First World War.

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 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.

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

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.

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

Black And White

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.

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

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.

Better Counsel Comes Overnight.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Never Stopped Reading.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Artists Are The Traditional Interpreters Of Dreams And Nightmares.

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.

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

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

I 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.

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

...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?

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

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.

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

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

Cats Mean Kittens, Plentiful And Frequent.

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.

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.

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.

Every Spendthrift Passion Has Its Attendant Courtiers.

Nicknames Are Potent Ways Of Cutting People Down To Size.

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

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.

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.

What Is A Hero Without Love For Mankind.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

You Simply Don't Get To Be Wise, Mature, Etc., Unless You've Been A Raving Cannibal For Thirty Years Or So.

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.

I Always Hated Tony Blair, From The Beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

People Are Just Cannibals Unless They Leave Each Other Alone.

Golden Notebook

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

Some People Obtain Fame, Others Deserve It.

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

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

I 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Think For Yourself

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

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

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

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

I 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.

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.

Laughter Is By Definition Healthy.

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.

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

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.

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

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I 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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.'

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Falling In Love

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

Thought Provoking

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

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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.

The 1960s Was Probably The First Time In History That Young People Were Recognized As A Big Group Of Consumers And As A Commercial Proposition For Madison Avenue. Advertising Played A Major Role In Creating The Ethos Of That Era - The Idea That, "here It Is, And You Can Have It Now." I Know That Many Kids Thought That The Ethos Of The 1960s Was Due To Their Own Peculiar Virtues, But, In Fact, It Had A Lot To Do With The Realities Of The Marketplace And Commerce.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Men Are Unwise And Curiously Planned.

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

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

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

Women Are Slaves To Their Beauty.

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.

Literature Is Analysis After The Event.

[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".

An Interim Report - That Is What An Autobiography Is.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?"

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

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