Quotes from Jan Mark

Inspiration is very nice when you get it. It's like being given a present you weren't expecting. You don't hand the present back and say, 'My birthday's not till November.' You take it and run.

Memory is your museum, your cabinet of curiosities, your 'Wunderkammer.' It will never be full; there is always room for something new and strange and marvelous. It will never need dusting. It will last as long as you do. You can't let the public in to walk around it, but you can take out the exhibits and share them, share what you know. You will never be able to stop collecting.

The beauties of the game may be lost on some of us sometimes, but many children will read about football when they will read nothing else, not for realism or glamour but for romance.

When writers for adults contemplate Venice, they behold decay, dereliction and death. Thomas Mann, Daphne du Maurier, L. P. Hartley and Salley Vickers have all dispatched hapless protagonists to Italy, where they see Venice - and die.

Inspiration is very nice when you get it. It's like being given a present you weren't expecting. You don't hand the present back and say, 'My birthday's not till November.' You take it and run.