“Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.”

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.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.

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.