Lots of us when we're children believe 'oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they'd know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.'

As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.

We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.

If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel, you become a royal reporter.

People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one's going to get far in later life playing by the system.

The only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges.

A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.

You cannot write down how people are good; you just know it, and cannot get away from it.

It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.

I would have been a disastrous soldier.

When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I'm writing.

The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.

We [USA] don't have diplomatic leverage to eliminate every vestige of a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. What we do have the leverage to do is to make sure that they don't have a weapon.

You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.

The music I play and write is all reflective of myself and the experiences in my life. I feel like my whole journey is just collecting stories and songs along the way.

Judgment is easy: it is black and white, as brutal as a gavel strike.

Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good.

Don't grieve for what doesn't come. Some things that don't happen keep disasters from happening.

Rich people are bigger than their problems. Poor people are smaller than their problems.

I envy animals for two things - their ignorance of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said about them.

Ambition, the soldier's virtue.