Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

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.

Many people will never read a Bible, but they will read you.

Remember what your mama told you about honey and vinegar: Be nice, and you’ll catch more flies, if nothing else.

Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.

I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist.

It is acceptable to bring someone to tears if it explains to them in an emotional way why a product, a service, or a candidate is the right person, is the right thing to do.

People who practice Zen correctly are not spaced-out or unrealistic. They are balanced and grounded.

I'm in a great situation because I know what kind of player I want to be, I know where I'm going to be, and I know what I have to do to get there and I'm around the right guys.

the Bible is used as a means of reinforcing their [women's] subordination to men through divine sanction.

We're living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious?

I don't think you should have firearms where people are drinking.