“Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.”

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes – they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn’t have much of a social life.

People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men.

Conflict resolution,’ said Nightingale. ‘Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.

When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there.

I was given some Harry Potter books by a young friend. I wanted to know why young people liked it so much. And I noted that there were some values in Harry Potter that are common to many books that are popular all over the world. In the end,