What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

[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.