There is always time for failure

Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.

The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.

I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.

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

I found criminal clients easy and matrimonial clients hard. Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.