There's a perception that British pies suffer from mediocrity, and historically they have. We're trying to re-educate people about what pie is.

Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

No one can say I didn't pay my dues in life.

The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.

The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living.