Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

I always try to travel light.

If I'll be funnier than this, I'll become a joke.

Even from just a little thing, it's still possible to die.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

Demographics is destiny.

When you're 20, you can't imagine being 30. When you're 30, you can't imagine being 40. When you're 40, you can't imagine being 100.

I am a little extrovert.

All social change comes from the passion of individuals.

A Yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been reviewed yet.

The Brits are ghastly. I never would accept a Brit. It would be like Laurence Olivier being happy getting a TV Times award.

The Land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards generosity, towards purity, towards calmness - it is India.