Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

And I didn't know I loved her till I'd dreamt of her. I didn't know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it.

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.