I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.