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

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

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

Intelligence forbids tears.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.