The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

My father was in the First World War.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.