I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.