I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.

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.