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It's very interesting what you don't care about.
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When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
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It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
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They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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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.
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We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.
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Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
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I never stopped reading.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
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I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.
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If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.