“If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say: ‘Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different . . .’”

“I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior.”

“Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex—that's one basic test of competence, after all.”

“There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.”

“I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.”

“If you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted allegorically.”

“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!”

“There was no mystery: even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry.”

On American English: “It seems to me that the contrast between adjacent syllables has lessened and the result is an over-reliance on enjambment. Now enjambment is a fine, intellectually strong aid, but like all such things it becomes tiresome and calls too much attention to itself.”

“I was having tea with [Yeats] one day, and I remember he picked up a pot of tea and, finding that it was already full of old tea, he opened the window of his Georgian house and flung the contents into the square! Rhetoric poured out of him all the while.”

“I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.”

“On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.”

On her refusal to publish with Virago Press: “I did not want to be published by them because they publish only women. It reminds one of ladies' compartments in nineteenth-century trains . . . ”

“The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.”

On the difference between eroticism and poetry: “When the crudity of the sexual act goes through the imagination it becomes eroticism, and when it doesn't, it is pornography.”

“The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes . . . Nowadays, there are too many books and not enough good ones.”

“I detest and despise success, yet I cannot do without it. I am like a drug addict if nobody talks about me for a couple of months I have withdrawal symptoms.”

On art and masochism: “I was reading van Gogh's letters. My God! I'm surprised he cut off only one ear, that he wasn't altogether shredded in pieces!”

Lady Diana Cooper was born in 1892, daughter of the 7th Duke of Rutland. Her mother, Violet Lindsay, was a Pre-Raphaelite artist and beauty, and the granddaughter of the 24th Earl of Crawford. Her pale, iridescent beauty —“the texture of Chinese silk” (Winston Churchill), her acute intelligence and iconoclastic wit, her innocent sense of fun, frank enjoyment of privilege and total lack of snobbery, made her “The Idol of the Golden Generation” before the First World War