Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party. - Alan Sillitoe

Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion.

Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about.

Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't.