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.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

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.'

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?