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

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?

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

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.