When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

Never apologise, never explain.

I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she really didn’t like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them.

Phrases like ‘the team spirit’ are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.

I have a great desire to make people smile – not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.

For those who like that sort of thing,” said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, “That is the sort of thing they like.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don’t.

It’s a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn’t leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle.

I wouldn’t take the Pope too seriously. He’s a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.