Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Under the old system - which is now so archaic that a lot of people can't remember it - if you wanted money you had to go to the bank and take the money out in cash form, and you couldn't take out money that you didn't have. But with the credit card you can spend money you don't have, and that is just so tempting.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.