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

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

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

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.

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.