After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .

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

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.

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