Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

[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.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

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.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.