Quotes from Linda Grant

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

I'm a really hectic dreamer; I never wake up not out of a dream, and there's loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they're all major enterprises.

When I was a child, on Sunday mornings the family would assemble around the blue-leather-covered gramophone to listen to records.

Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser.

It became obvious to me that the generation who changed the world were my parents' generation, and not only in terms of the Second World War, but if you look at all the social legislation of the '60s - abortion, homosexual law reform, equal pay - it wasn't done by my generation; it was done by people who were adults.

I'm not shy, not reclusive, not any of those things, but the idea of a day in front of me when I have nothing to do, is just, oh what pleasure!

I was embarrassed by my parents. I thought they had nothing of interest to say or contribute to anything. My real crime was not understanding that they were interesting, and I have been trying to make it up to them for being so indescribably blase, so genuinely uninterested and dismissive.

When I was in my 20s in the 1970s, I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'

a type I would never have met, only read about in books, for books were where you found life, without the effort of being in the real world.

The glory of the library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken.

spring did seem to come to this part of London earlier than to other, rougher neighbourhoods, the cherry-blossom anticipated warmer weather, as if the rich were owed nicer seasons.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.

You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.

How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.

Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else's library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs. I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.

And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy's eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence

At the core of misogyny is this paradigm: that men judge women by how they look, their physical beauty and its adornment by dress, while characterising the need to look beautiful as concrete evidence of female triviality.

If you want to understand the life of a foreign city, how people go about their day-to-day business, what they buy and what they look like, go to the supermarket. I rarely have the need to purchase a box of breakfast cereal or a loaf of bread while abroad, but watching others do it tells me more about a place than being led around in a crocodile behind a tour guide's umbrella.

You think your parents are there just to love and irritate you. You see them as satellites spinning round your sun and you try to run away across the universe while they chase you.

But who can really remember pain? It's impossible, you don't remember it, you only fear it returning. These thoughts are like stitches - you see together a memory with them and the flesh heals over into a scar. The scar is the memory.

Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books. They burned, amongst many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too dangerous.