I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

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.

When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.