“Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.”

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.

I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’

If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.

I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.

[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.

But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.

Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.

The bottom line is what we do might not be the safest so there is always some risk but we are ready to take that into account because we love racing and we love motor sports and it is dangerous.

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.

In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.

The fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.

Any journey around Islington involves hundreds of speed bumps that seem to tear the bottom of your car off.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.

Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.