The trouble with children is that they are not returnable.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think of what to do with the long winter evenings.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.