“I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?”

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

“...But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.”

“All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.”

“I don't always understand poetry!''You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it...whenever.”

“HEADMASTER: I was a geographer. I went to Hull.IRWIN: Oh. Larkin.HEADMASTER: Everybody says that. 'Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry...as I say, I was a geographer...but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves. Art. They get away with murder.”

“I would have thought," said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature." "Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity.”