I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

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

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.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.