One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.