To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.

I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?

As child, when the elders spoke their wise words, it only echoes in my ears. As adult, I have crystal clear insight to the wise aphorisms by the elderly.

It is always now

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I'm a grown up, they call me a writer.

That, to me, is what I feel like is the future. If I have a daughter, if you have a daughter, becoming that ideal where it's not about your gender; it's about us being human, being in this together.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

I'm not Russell Crowe. I'm not going to do a period piece.

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

I think when judges are in the position of authority, they really get bent out of shape when someone tells them they acted inappropriately.

Comedy is just to me, maybe it's a natural knack, if I can see where the joke is in the writing and I can see where the setup is and I can tell this is the way to make it.

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.