Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

Lists are a form of power.