I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose.