"Did they preach one thing and practice another, these men of God?"

"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it."

"Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home."

"I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt."

"A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not."

"All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe."

"My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it."

"I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself."

"To shipbrokers, coal was black gold."

"When I was 2, we moved into an imposing country mansion 8 miles west of Cardiff, Wales."

"Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset."

"When I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys along the way. We would set out together after school across the village green."

"I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible."

"The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort."

"An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details."

"Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English."

"The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him."

"Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever."

"Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife."

"All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely."

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."

"I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do."

"Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more."

"Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us."

"I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers."

"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people."

"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."