What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.