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.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.