Quotes

There is no conclusive proof of Unidentified Flying Objects flying over India-China border.

All my life I have fought corruption.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

Truth comes to us mediated by human love.

It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.

I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter,' that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

It is the woman - nearly always - in spite of all the advances of modern feminism, who still takes responsibility for the bulk of the chores, as well as doing her paid job. This is true even in households where men try to be unselfish and to do their share.

I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

I had lost faith in biography.

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

A busybody's work is never done.

I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.

I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.

If only Queen Elizabeth II had the intellectual, political and linguistic skills of Queen Elizabeth I, many people would support giving her some of the powers of an elected president.

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.