“I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.”

The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,

Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.

Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.

f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!

I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.

There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.

And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

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.

Polite conversation is rarely either.

People in our so-called Rust Belt have lost out, and politics and society have not been responsive either in providing the kind of additional support they need or to retrain them for jobs that are being created in the new economy.

George had taken off all ten of his fingers and tied them into a bundle with what appeared to be either his own small intestines.

God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!

The word “souvenir” has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

A collected poems’ is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

Either I act or I die.