Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind.

All we have to do is listen. The Good Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth, my dear white-headed mother used to say.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.