For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.

There are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries. For the most part, it hasn't begun to touch the lives of poor and working women in the Third World, and that distresses me.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

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