Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

Small things amuse small minds.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

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. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

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.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

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. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

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.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.

Pearls mean tears.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

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.

The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Literature is analysis after the event.

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.

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.

I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

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.

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.

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.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

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 before I popped off.

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.