Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.
Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.
Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.