“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.”

Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?

It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.

I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’

If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.

I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.

[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.

But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.

Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.