The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.

Check-ups are, in my experience, a grave mistake; all they do is allow the quack of your choice to tell you that you have some sort of complaint that you were far happier not knowing about.

The secret of good health and happiness is to have rather small illnesses throughout your life which you can rely on to stop you doing anything you don't want to do.

The people look forbidding, solemn, marked by that impossible ideal, Communism, which, like Christianity, seemed to demand too much of humanity and, falling into the wrong hands, led too easily to horrible brutality.

We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.

When... I told my father I wanted to be a writer, he had asked me to consider my unfortunate wife, who would have me about the house all day 'wearing a dressing gown, brewing tea and stumped for words'.