“To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.”

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.

I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.

Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.

You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.

My films are about embarrassment.

I love Britain. It really worries me, the prospect of Ed Miliband propped up by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP and what that could do to our country. It’s absolutely right that we highlight to voters that potential risk.

Music was the one thing that was just mine, and no one could take it from me. I created it, dictated it, and it made me not able to let go of it.

Before God could bring me to this place He has broken me a thousand times.

Complaining is the absolute worst possible thing you could do for your health or your wealth. The worst!

If I could spit out a litter of kids, I would.

If I could pass along anything that my mother or my sisters taught me, I feel like my kids would be very well off.

It has been invariably my experience that I could count on his cooperation and sympathy in every matter concerning my scientific work.

If anything could have pulled me out of retirement, it would have been an Indiana Jones film.