If you look across the valley, you can see exactly what I mean: about four beautiful houses, and you think something is happening in each of them. It's like a mural.

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.

For sheer sexiness, a man must be beautiful. Funny. yes. Clever, no.

I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.

My own parents loved each other very much.

It must be a terrible pressure to have to go to the office.

I live at home and, if I want to start work at 11 o'clock, I can.

I'm basically a very happy person and I don't have to be anybody else.

I love the long grass coming up to meet the willows.

There is nothing more attractive than a man who is not a New Man.

Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake all afternoon.

I was so flattered that someone wanted me to write a book, I said I would. It was published in 1969.

I think it bespeaks a generous nature, a man who can cook.

You've simply got to go on and on with your family and friends and tell them how much you love them because you never know whether they'll be there tomorrow, do you?

And I would really like to be a grandmother, but only when Felix or Emily meet the right person and are ready.

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.

The bank told us we ought to sell this house to pay off our overdraft. Riders saved the day. I was so pleased when it got to number one, I went all around the fields crying and crying.

I'd never have written the big books in London.

At home I have big vats of cabbage soup that I make to slim down.

If you look across the valley, you can see exactly what I mean: about four beautiful houses, and you think something is happening in each of them. It's like a mural.

But really I'm not terribly interested in what I eat.

I would really like to spend more time with the family. Every time I go abroad I miss them all dreadfully.

I've got a book coming out soon so I just must get some weight off.

But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.

Leo, sadly, has Parkinson's, but he used to cook all sorts of dazzling things.

People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried.

The only thing a whirlwind courtship does is blow dust in everyones eyes.

The male - I have found - is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.

We all came from houses with doors, doors that were supposed to be closed when there were things going on that we weren't supposed to see, and when our pants were down.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

Portugal is a high hill with a white watch tower on it flying signal flags. It is apparently inhabited by one man who lives in a long row of yellow houses with red roofs, and populated by sheep who do grand acts of balancing on the side of the hill.

I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below.

Well, honey, I had the million dollar houses, I had the car, I had the horse, I had the barn; I had everything. Was I set free? I didn't even know what that meant.

I don't trawl record shops anymore. I usually hear music in bars or at friends' houses.

Why can't we, with a more intelligent policy, actually have houses that are affordable, built at higher densities than they are at the moment and built on brownfield sites.

I mean, I was born the day war broke out, but I don't remember all the bombs though they did actually break up Liverpool, you know. I remember when I was a little older, there was big gaps in all the streets where houses used to be. We used to play over them.

To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life miracle to miracle.

I rent houses in LA when I'm filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to be with people. I'm not a beach bunny.

It was very clear that this was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen assumed it was an old Indian site. Bu Indians didn't use that kind of buildings and houses.

Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament?

People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

You do not build your own houses, nor make your own garments, nor bake your own bread, simply because you know that if you were to attempt all these things they would all be more or less ill done.

When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called "Dead End." The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff.

Rich men's houses are seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original. It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty.

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.

After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn't annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

If you take away money, if you take away the houses and things, who are we really? What is love really about? What is it to love each other? Why do we stay together, and why do all the kids split? All these questions I have really deep inside of me.