What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

Being a mod is more of a sensibility than a style.

You could say I'm a mod, but with a small 'm'; I don't wear a parka, but I do question what I wear and what I listen to, which is what it's all about.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

I've got a stag weekend coming up and I've said I'm not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won't have it. I'll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

True heroics, obviously, is not the absence of fear, but having that fear and doing something anyway.

Sherlock and Watson are a love story

The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.

Big people never scare me. I am a little man. I can easily hide.

He stares at me so darkly, so hungily that I can only nod. Agree. Of course, I feel it. "I do", I admit.

Bill Clinton was for NAFTA. I heard him over in Tokyo he came out all said it was a great bill. Secretary Clinton was for it. She called it the gold standard when she was secretary of state.

The White House encouraged Tom Brady to be more of a role model. They would've said more, but there was a drunken Secret Service agent streaking across the Rose Garden.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

All men [are] of one metal, but not in one mold.

I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

In order not to annul our free will, I judge it true that Fortune may be mistress of one half our actions but then even she leaves the other half, or almost, under our control.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.