“I always remember how a novel written by John Braine in the 1950s about working-class life in England, which was called Room at the Top, which was translated into Swedish as The Attic!”

“Co-written with John Byrum based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham.”

“Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.”

“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”

“I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have written down.”

“There is a Swedish word, kulturbärer, which can be translated as "culture-bearer" but still doesn't mean much. It's not a concept that has much American use, although it should have.”

“A very remarkable work… in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman.”

“If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.”

“What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.
These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.”

“Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space…”