Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part - sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn't buy a better grumbling outfit.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.