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 yo...
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 f...
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept a...
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
We are all creatures of the stars.
You can only value something if you've experienced it.
That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a new way.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.
In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my...
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?
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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.
When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a...
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having a...
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort...