Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.