A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.