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1. There’s always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they’re usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
2. There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don’t.
3. This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we — we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.
4. Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
5. My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
6. Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
7. When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
8. I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success.’
9. I’m sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what’s going on in the world.
10. I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes — of course, there are thousands. It’s a very talented city.
11. With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.
12. I wasn’t an active feminist in the ’60s, never have been.
13. When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
14. My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
15. The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
16. That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
17. 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.
18. Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
19. I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it’s very painful.
20. I’ve worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.