A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

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.

I loved her

We only live a hundred yearsLet's Make it the best time of our life

The days draw out, the weather gets warmer, and it's what we call summer, with a bitter laugh when we've said it.

MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated.

No matter how close we got to a station or a disc jockey ... they could disappear into the ether without so much as a wave goodbye or a farewell song.

For them that think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely.

In football you sometimes have beauty and cruelty together.

Be spectacularly great at what you do. Wear your passion on your sleeve and hold your heart in the palm of your hand. And work hard. Really hard.

There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.