There's comfort to an awful old dressing-gown a pretty peignoir is powerless to provide, and aging bra elastic, is, I suspect, as near to liberation as most women ever get.

Things a mother should know: how to comfort a son without exactly saying Daddy was wrong.

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.

[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age.

It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority.

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.

Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.