“Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.”

“Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)”

“There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.”

“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”

“There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think...Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course.”

“Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.”

“You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.”