DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all:That would have been too much like dying

I've had a lifelong obsession with urban legends and American folklore.

Don't fall into the trap of believing so deeply in your own ideology that you cannot even see the flaws in it.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and... there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover.

The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.

What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

Ego is even worse than dirt and filth because it attacks others.

If anybody says their facelift doesn't hurt, they're lying. It was like I'd spent the night with an axe murderer.

Some people are so busy in learning the tricks of the trade that they never learn the trade.