Author Quotes

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I play golf - badly.

I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.

Once you're in charge of your job, your house, your children, getting the food on the table, doing all of this, all of the time, it'd be nice for someone else to be in charge for a bit maybe.

If you've been married for 400 years, as I have, it's nice to experience first love again and you can vicariously through a book.

I've set the bar quite high in terms of storytelling.

I'm looking forward to getting back to my house and my Ugg boots and not washing sometimes, and getting back to writing.

I think women love to read love stories.

I really like clever men who challenge you.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I'm not a great writer.

When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.

The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.