If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.