It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow

I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.

The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did.

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

Without love, life is so boring.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.

It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea.

The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

You know I had rather be laughed at than not to be noticed at all.