“Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.”

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.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.

But when the morning comes, I realize that there’s nothing to be done about what has already happened.

Much of God’s will for your life is already found in the Bible.

You don’t make Him Lord. He’s Lord already. You just recognize it.

If I haven’t had any long term psychological side effects from all the things I’ve already done on this show, this isn’t gonna hurt much more.

The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work.

The Futurists?…. Well, of course, they are already past.