I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.

My parents were marvelously educated people.

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.

Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.

The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church, in a nutshell.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.