I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

The actor's popularity is evanescent applauded today forgotten tomorrow.

Being a comedian is like being a con man. You have to make 'em like you before you can fool 'em.

Doctor told me I've got two weeks to live. I said: "Can I have the last week in July and the 1st week in August?"

There were so many fewer questions when stars were still just the holes to heaven.

I learn from thinking about the future, what hasn't been done yet. That's kind of my constant obsession.

As reforms have come into India, as India has started opening up, prosperity is increasing, as is demand for urban housing.

The saddest songs are written when a person is happy.

A lot of heavyweights, with the exception of a few Eastern Europe fighters, they really look like being a heavyweight is just like, who can eat the most Pizza Hut and McDonalds.

You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.

For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.