Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

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.

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

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

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

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

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

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

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

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...

Laughter is by definition healthy.

We are all creatures of the stars.

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

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

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.

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.

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

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

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.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

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

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

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

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

I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that?

Sometimes I dislike women I dislike us all because of our capacity for not thinking when it suits us...

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

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be," he said, obstinately. "But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity?

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

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