“Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?”

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.

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.

So he can add his voice to the chorus of others whether it’s gay activists or now a New Testament professor.

While it is true that we must seek value added industries like food processing plants and call center operations.

I will lobby tirelessly in cooperation with other mayors around the country to insure that federal funding for our recently added police officers continues.

It adds a little action and gives the fans something to look at rather than the monotonous routine, no matter how perfectly the play is made.

It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.

Remakes are awesome, especially when it honors yet adds a new component or dimension to the original.

For as from the same piece of clay a potter may fashion either a pot or a tile, so the Devil may shape a witch into a wolf or a cat or even a goat, without subtracting from her and without adding to her at all.

I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.