Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

I did not throw 'The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation' at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.

So it's off with the shellsuit and on with the Armanis, Bring out the champagne and the caviar sarnies

Patterns repeat themselves in history

It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.

I think that's the way to go - dive into the music and don't think, stay frozen, why don't we all stay frozen in time for awhile?

We all come from dysfunctional families and these days I guess that's pretty normal.

Reason, alas, does not remove mountains. It only tries to walk around them, and see what is on the other side.

Art is the ideal medium for making contact with the transcendental, or at least for getting close to it.

I've always said, 'I don't want to be irrelevant.'

The world has to save Syria. I mean, this has dramatic implications for the entire region, globally.

I had no idea that he was going to write that, but I've always believed that insecurity was what would keep you always in your innocence, no matter what the business did.