Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

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

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.

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.