Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge.

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

I know that I will never find my father in any other man who comes into my life, because it is a void in my life that can only be filled by him.

Film is the most expensive, highest risk industry in the world.

Eat more berries. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and other varieties have anthocyanins that can help reverse some loss of balance and memory associated with aging.

The wages of Gin is Debt.

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.

Marrying a woman for her money is very much like setting a rat-trap, and baiting it with your own finger.

Being famous gives you a lot of illusions of false self, of self-importance, a grandiosity, it becomes difficult to stay humble and real. You see so many people who don't succeed.

It is the doom of men that they forget.

I think my fondest memories would be with Sting, and Steamboat, Dusty and er… I made a lot of money wrestling Wahoo McDaniel and Jack Mulligan too. It’d be hard to pinpoint one.

Your income right now is a result of your standards, it is not the industry, it is not the economy.