The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

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.'

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

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.