The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'

My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.

Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

Are we savages or what?