Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

Raids are slightly constipating.

Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.