For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.

By the tits of Holy Agnes

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

We have a number of very powerful women in the world now - Mrs. [Angela] Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher? When she was minister of education, she stopped the children's free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it. They called her "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher."

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.