Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.

If one of the best ways to appreciate life is to have an unhappy childhood, I was very fortunate.

In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort.

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well

I'd learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today — whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.
But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.

Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise.

All I can say is that in my case comedy was keeping the joy of a happy childhood going strong.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.