The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.

Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.