I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don't buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side, 'said the dewdrop to the lake.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, " the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.

It's funny as I get older I'm reverting to my roots - I want to plant stuff.

Those who believe they can move mountains, do!

And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.

It's empowering for women to have some tricks up their sleeve to help them look their best.

What I learned as a young child continues to have a tremendous impact on my life today.

Liverpool will think 'we could have won this 2-2'