Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.