A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.

With faster Internet and better computers, you'd better believe we're creating and consuming more digital data.

Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.

I think I can do more inside the Republican Party to keep it in the center of the road. That's where Eisenhower was. And I'm an unabashed Eisenhower Republican.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation's political and financial elites - as we have done - what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain?

The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.

When a culture simply shrugs about what happens to people in war, it breaks the fragile sequence, the bond between all people.

The thing that helped me come to terms with performing was an anxiety, a desperation for acceptance. There was never enough positive motivation in my life.

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.