Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.

People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever.

If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.

Food is the supremest of pleasures.

Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.