Several quoted remarks to Anne and Adam Fremantle, found in Anne Fremantle's Three-Cornered Heart, pages 192–5.

Anne asked BR why he divorced Alys. BR replied, "Because she had madness in her family and I wanted children." She asked BR why he divorced Dora. BR replied, "Because I could not afford the children she had after we married which were not by me."

BR told Adam how unhappy he was in his youth and how the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, saved his life.

"One night I went to bed determined to commit suicide next day. I dreamed that the Master of Balliol stood at the foot of my bed and told me, 'Don't do it, young man; don't do it; you will live to regret it.' Which was nonsense, of course, but when I woke up I was completely cured. I didn't commit suicide then, and I have never wanted to since."

They turned to talking about BR's children. On John, they discussed how he had been in Washington with the British Admiralty Mission during the war and how he had divorced his wife.

On Kate, "Last time I saw her she had her arm in a sling; she had fallen out of a tree or something. Kate married an American too, Charles Tait, a don, and they live near Harvard."

On Conrad, "He is a tug [scholar] at Eton" studying Classics. "Yes, classics. It is odd; I suppose whatever one is forbidden is what one wants, and if only God had the sense to forbid us to be good, we all would be perfect paragons at once."

On his plane crash in Norway, BR said, "I was sitting in the front part of the plane, and they wouldn't let me smoke. 'I must smoke or I'll die', I said. If I hadn't smoked, I would have died, for I was allowed to smoke at the back of the plane. ... I didn't know until much later that all the people in the front part of the plane were drowned—nineteen in all."