“You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.”

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.

Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

A book, as it were, closes the book.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.

The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.

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.

We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.

So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

My experience came before most of you were born.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

Love is, after all, a selfish thing; and it throws a black shadow on anything between which and the light it stands.

I don’t want to do anything over again, ever again. I want only to do what I haven’t done. There’s no “again.” There’s only the future. I hate the past – especially my own past.

Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it’s supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There’s nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.

No one’s promised anything. You could have the biggest record on radio and sell no records.

I never drink anything hot; I don’t like hot drinks, very strange.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.