“I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.”

The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.

An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.

The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.

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.

We communicate happiness to others not often by great acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, but by the absence of fault-finding and censure, by being ready to sympathize with their notions and feelings, instead of forcing them to sympathize with ours.

I would do it again if I had the chance.

I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective.

Touring is a rough thing. You don’t have any time to look around or stop and think if what you’re doing is making you happy.

They were not happy. For the sake of the film, they had to streamline everything.

What we do is try to pair them up so that both sides are happy.

I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can’t see how to do it.

Really, as long as I am working and have diversity, I am happy.