If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

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

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.