A writer helps to show you things you knew but didn't know you knew.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

Awareness seeped in and brought its friends Pain and Agony for a visit.

. . . for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.

Most of the books I read these days are children's books at bedtime.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

Many aspects of life cannot be explained through logic or reason. The reasoning part of the mind simply doesn't have the capacity to understand the many whys and how's of being and non-being.

All roads lead to Trantor, says the old proverb, and that is where all stars end.

When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry - for the clothes.

The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.

So it's the greatest compliment in the world when people want to hear you sing. That means it feels good to them, so I keep doing it.