I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one.

One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.

In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.

As anyone who has ever fallen foul of an airport, a conventional hospital or a bad restaurant knows, misery is made up of little things.

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

An office party is not, as is sometimes supposed, the Managing Director's chance to kiss the tea-girl. It is the tea-girl's chance to kiss the Managing Director (however bizarre an ambition this may seem to anyone who has seen the Managing Director face on).

In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.