“What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'Then we haven't got sound government.”

“The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.”

“I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.”

“He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.”