“Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.”

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it’s any different.

Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn’t bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

nothing is so sad as the injustices of old age.

There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course – the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled

The sun burnt on, drugging everything with warmth.

I’ve never been drawn to the feminist movement. I was brought up to believe that men had little to do with the home or children – except to bring in the money.

When passion is mutual, there is always the danger of the fire burning to ashes.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Moonlight lined the windowsills like a fall of snow.

Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.

When truthsayers have the courage to say the emperor is wearing no clothes, whether you agree with their point of view or not, send them love. They are to be acknowledged for speaking their truth.

But there’s no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it’s hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.

The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view

I have feelings that are to the right, and I have feelings that land on the left side of the aisle.

In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you’re a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn’t matter where you come from.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.