Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.