I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.