I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know tha...
I have no scenery to help me and no words are written for me to speak. There is no curtain. But out of the vivid dream of somebody else’s life I have to create an atmosphere—for that is advocacy.
I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people’s.
I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged t...
He said: It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it’s probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity. They
For heaven's sake, Darling, keep your crusading instinct [for social justice] under control...It's uncomfortable to live with especially for those of us who haven't got one.
But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.
A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian vill...
When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action is clear in mind when I start -- so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing it seems almost physica...
What it was he had chiefly gained: a fascination with the complexity of the intellectual bastions which men could construct to withstand the tides of disbelief. His own disbelief had remained unshaken...
To collect me. That is what we can so easily be made to feel at seventy-three; an object, not exactly precious but likely to be brittle, to be carefully collected, conscientiously cared for and as con...
If you stood apart long enough, weren’t you in danger of stifling, perhaps even losing, that quickening spirit which the priests here would call the soul?
But he still lingered, feeling the wind lift his hair and grateful for another minute of peace. He was grateful, too, that Kate Miskin could share it with him without the need to speak and without mak...
And would she herself have married Darcy had he been a penniless curate or a struggling attorney? ...Elizabeth knew that she was not formed for the sad contrivances of poverty.
Neither man spoke of the past. Darcy could not rid himself of its power but Wickham lived for the moment, was sanguine about the future and reinvented the past to suit his audience, and Darcy could al...