When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.