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

"If publishers are here, I've got a feeling they will agree with whatever I say because the publishing houses are packed full of people who love literature and whose hearts are being broken all the time by what happens, by the reign of the accountants.

There is a phenomenon which I call the Educated Barbarian. This is someone who could have been in school or university for many years, could have won prizes by the score, and at the end has read nothing, knows no history, and above all is totally incurious. Quite a large number of my young friends are like this. They're all utterly delightful. We have a wonderful time together. We gossip, we go shopping. We chat about our friends, but at the slightest mention of anything literary their eyes glaze over. Looking back at my misspent youth, I can remember people who were not particularly literary. They were not even very educated, but they would take for granted that they should have read War and Peace. They did not say, "Oh this is so difficult. Oh this is too long and I don't understand the long words." They just read it. That's what people were like then."

She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to know I haven't got to go through with living is like a reprieve. How extraordinary! And every one of these people, with the possible exception of this exuberant young man, is terrified that the machine is going to crash, and yet we all trooped obediently into it. So perhaps we all feel the same way?

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