I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.

I don't write books inadvertently.

A busybody's work is never done.