Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.