Every child has the capacity to be everything.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all - in one way or another - obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.