Also, everyone thinks they know Candide - you hear people described as 'Panglossian'. So if Candide appears on a poster, it feels familiar.

The financial crisis happened because no-one could actually say out loud how bad things were.

We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away.

It's a book that makes me laugh and think - it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide!

Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.

Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will.

I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight tweets per day .

Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly.

In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched.

The French cook we open tins.

I suffer mornings most of all I feel so powerless and small By ten o'clock I'm back in bed Fighting the jury in my head

The pictures of my family were designed to be on a family wall, they were supposed to be together. It was supposed to copy my mother's wall in her house.

We mustn't waste time; for that's the stuff life's made of.

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

I just think that the whole diva thing is a misrepresentation of who I am.

The next greatest pleasure to love is to talk of love.

There are so many emotions that are just better when you react to people reacting to it. Like laughter.

You want me to sneak up on an angel and rip out its pinfeathers, so you can make a fashion statement?

The Bible is shallow enough for a new believer to wade in, but deep enough for a theologian to drown in.