Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts… - Alan Bennett

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things.
"The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize."
"Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.