Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Hope is a talent like any other.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

In every out-thrust headland in every curving beach in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins justice ends?

My grandmother went to church, but my mother had been inundated with church and decided that when she had children, she would not push church or God on her children.

I was never someone who had a lot of confidence in anything that had to do with using your brain. I really was lost in my life after football.

Ethics is not just an abstract intellectual discipline. It is about the conflicts that arise in trying to meet real human needs and values.

I spend most of my time writing.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.