Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.

Of course it's all right for librarians to smell of drink.

I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.

The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that's all.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.

We are more sensitive to losses than to gains

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.-Thomas Jefferson

Every great building once begun as a building plan. That means, sitting in that building plan on the table is a mighty structure not yet seen. It is the same with dreams.

I have once more taken up things that can't be done: water with grasses weaving on the bottom. But I'm always tackling that sort of thing!

Friends are the ones who will always have your back and their perspective on you doesn't change no matter what

You should smile more often.' 'Can't.' He grunted as he opened her shirt to expose her chest. 'My face might freeze like that.

It's best to let her go," he says. No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.

Being free is a state of mind.

So-called "progressives" actively wage war on progress. . . . Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.

In my career as a double, a lot of my job is to not just do the fights to make them look cool, but also to appear as the same person as the actor I am playing.