"So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is."

"What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head."

"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so."

"Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience."

"Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds."

"It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you."

"Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone."

"All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh."

"Younger woman says, 'I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad.'Yes, [older woman responds] 'I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?"

"It's a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won't accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won't accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything."

"Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears - everything, in delicate vibration."

"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."

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

"There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be."

"That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a new way."

"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."

"September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible."

"What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip."

"Laughter is by definition healthy."

"Free women,' said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: 'They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them."

"What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula."

"It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes."

"There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth."

"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."

"For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying."

"Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong."

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

"We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes."

"I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents."

"We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed."

"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."

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."

"What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better."

"We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our heart in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's faces like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: 'Take my wound'. Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all; one simply expects to get rid of one's one."

"Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel."

"What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared."

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

"Listen Anna, if we don't believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there's no hope for us. We're going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas."

"You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature."

"I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it."

"I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young."

"As I was saying, that's the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream."

"There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless."

"A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer."

"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."

"I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see."

"Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them."

"Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter - yet it's the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense."

"This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - 'nostalgia' is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined."

"What is a hero without love for mankind."