“The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.”

“You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.”

“. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”

“Nigel Barton:Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there.Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then?”

“My only regret is to die four pages too soon.”

“...that parish which allows the living to grasp the no longer cold hand of the beloved dead”

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”