Of course one never knows in draft if it's going to turn out, even with my age and experience.

I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organize and concentrate-or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my 'ten minutes'. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.

In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still ... In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights, but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

Drink very good tea out of a thin Wocester cup of colour between apricot and pink.