I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.