Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.

The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.