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

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

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.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

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

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

When today's young woman says she isn't a feminist what she means is she isn't a lesbian and she doesn't hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist.