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

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.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

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

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

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.

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.