[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?