“Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.”

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

Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.

A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.

To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.

And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.

I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.

Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.

However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.

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.

Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.

It isn’t for everybody and it can burn people out, and that’s what’s happened in the past.

The sound is just sound, why should you go and grab it? You see that actually it was you who went out and disturbed the sound.

Adaptation is always the same process for me, which is some version of throwing the book at the wall and seeing what pages fall out.

So she pulled the cord out of the wall, opened the second-floor window, and just threw it out the window.

Unwatched truth is the enchantment of childhood.And we never grow out of it.

There are people who are born and die and never once are aware of their breath going in and out of their body. That’s how far away they live from themselves

If we do our best and make efforts, a peaceful and great future will become ours without fail.

I don’t feel out of place. I think of earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is and the would be put an end to it.