“Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.”

Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

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?

The Devil is an Ass , I do acknowledge it.

Everything else should be a piece of cake. Feel good, feel happy, feel healthy, feel loved, feel abundant, feel creative, feel compassionate, feel knowledgeable, feel powerful.

When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.

Something that many officials in the West don’t see or don’t realize or don’t acknowledge – and in the interest of the Russian people, because they have been facing terrorists for decades now.

What we admire we praise; and when we praise, Advance it into notice, that its worth Acknowledged, others may admire it too.

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

A brave man acknowledges the strength of others.