We all lie to each other, present some sort of front.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldnt have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.

Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.