If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.