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.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.

There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.

When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.