“Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”

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.

His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.

This is much more than your typical thriller. Tim Johnston has written a book that makes Gone Girl seem gimmicky . . . Johnston is an excellent writer.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you.

The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.

Nothing is more devastating to a community than out-of-control crime.

I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material – something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.

The results became more and more apparent. Crime rates went down in the border region.

For some reason the more time that elapses after the film opens, the more favorable the reviews become.