Born on October 27th

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

"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."

"The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists."

"It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics."

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

"There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II - the first computer it produced for the mass market - many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen."

"If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch."

"The scribbler's life is never done."

"Anti-Semitism is extremely common."

"I had lost faith in biography."

"A busybody's work is never done."

"Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations."

"Truth comes to us mediated by human love."

"I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind."

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

"The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'"

"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."

"Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not."

"If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey."

"The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men."

"Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed."

"'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life."

"Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man."

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

"I don't write books inadvertently."