My dear father always said that when everybody had a telephone nobody would have any manners, because there wouldn't be time for them. And of course he was perfectly right.

There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

... the things that happened in your body were never as bad as the things that happened in your mind.

When there is too much to say it is easier to say nothing at all.

Anyone who pretends not to be interested in money is either a fool or a knave.

Anger was both a disfiguring and a revealing passion.

Children want one thing at a time, and want that one thing passionately.