Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

confession ran in the family.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.