I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.

Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.... Accepting another person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.

I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.

It was the same with friendship. Disagreement between friends and spouses, too had to be carefully handled. If the time you spent with friends was consumed by disagreement, then there was no room for the essence of friendship, which was a sharing of the world. And that sharing involved seeing things the same way, or at least seeing things through the eyes of the friend.

I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.