“I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.”

Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.

I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.

That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.

Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.

A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.

To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.

And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.

I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.

Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

I DYED MY HAIR BLUE AND GREW SOME TITTIES

My first instrument was a little blue ukele.

The blues is life itself.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun’s rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you’re left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

I’ve not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I’ll listen to ‘Spiral Scratch’ by the Buzzcocks, or ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

FLYING DOWN SUNSET SMOKING CRACK TRANSVESTITE IN THE FRONT EDDI MURPHY IN THE BACK MOP HAD ME GRINDY AND GRIDDY MARILYN MANSON.

Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there’s no use even trying.