“The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.”

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

The writer is all alone.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

My mother could make anybody feel guilty – she used to get letters of apology from people she didn’t even know.

America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

There was huge pressure, especially before the big games. Not many people believed in us, but we believed in ourselves. We wanted to do something good and we did.

I was an average student. I wasn’t any standout. I remember when people started to know who I was and the label offers, people started to get a little weird and be weird around me.

There are many things I want, and the only way I will get them is to keep my head down, listen to the right people and work hard.

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources–because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent. It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to speak out to many thousands of people.