“The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”

“Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.”

“Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.”

“All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.”

“I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.”

“I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.”

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.”

“And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.”

“One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.”

“I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.”

“I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.”