What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

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 illusion of confidence is far more important than actually possessing the feeling.

Too many women throw themselves into romance because they're afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won't do that.

Friends die one by one, but so, thank God, do enemies.

Economic growth is not only unncessary, but ruinous.

Europe's the mayonnaise all right, but America supplies the good old lobster.

My best takes aren't necessarily take five or take six. My best takes are usually take two.

An optimist is the person who has never had any experience at all.

You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.

All my weak days have a common cause - I have neglected communion with God through my neglect of the Scriptures & prayer. When will I learn?