There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

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.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

Small things amuse small minds.

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

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

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

Literature is analysis after the event.

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

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

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

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

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

Pearls mean tears.

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

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.

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

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

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.

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

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

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

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

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.

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

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

A story is how we construct our experiences.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

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

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

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.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

I am your original autodidact.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

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

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

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

I have ideas that I will probably never write now.

I haven't got the energy to write now.