We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.