Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.

The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills- like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.

All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.