“Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.”

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.

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

Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.

Wembley way is beginning to blacked with people in terms of red and blue

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

Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.

In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings.

Begin challenging your own assumptions.

Sin is like a journey, it begins with one step.

All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.