London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

The last great Englishman is low.

I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.

A comedian sees the world bent. I'm tangent to the circle.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

I don't really recognise success. I don't see myself as on an upwardly mobile trajectory. I see myself as on the edge of a cliff about to fall off.

At the age of nine, playing the violin at school, and then onto the mandolin.

If a caribou needs to be sacrificed for the sake of energy independence, I say, 'Mr. Caribou, maybe you need to take one for the team.'

Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.

We can accept God becoming Man to save Man, but not Man becoming God to save himself.

Kansas is a piece of real estate that completely disproves the theory of roundness as a quality of the planet earth.