I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.

Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal.

That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.

Companies are looking to be quicker with content, provide faster approval and be able to capitalize on the conversation and content of the moment.

This is one of my big things of creative pursuits. You have your idea you want to do, but then you got to figure out what does this thing want to be? You got to let it lead you a little.

I'm an old-school type of guy.

A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.

For me, addiction never really included telling myself that everything was okay. By the time I was deep in my addictions, I knew things were pretty bad and I had no control over them.

Glory is like a circle in the water