If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.