“You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.”

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.

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.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Everybody has to find out: who are you? What do you believe in?

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not color’d like his own, and having pow’r T’ enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.

An Awakened person is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad.

One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.

Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

The main aim of the [political] dialogue should be to resolve the problems of the nation, not to find who is the winner and who is the loser.