No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next. It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.
And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.
Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.
I know what’s required. It’s perfectly simple: Justice.
Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it.
One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.
Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.
A man has been arrested in Epsom for signalling to German planes with a lighted cigarette.
One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.
To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.