Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.
The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.
If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.
...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.
If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.
Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.
America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.