the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves..

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for..

I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as….

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity..

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility..

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk..

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports..

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it..

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are sha….

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics..

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience ev….

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern..

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious..

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it..

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by….

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time..

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature..

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear..

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outw….

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and….

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art..