While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.

One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.