I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.

Every decoding is another encoding.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.

It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about

The secret to living is loving.

It's hard luck always having to be a judge.

Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.

Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.

It's better to waste money than time. You can always get more money.

Music, unleashed, can uplift and create and destroy, stripping away pretenses and leaving raw, exposed vulnerability behind.

The Gospel of transformation is from men and women of earth to men and women of eternities.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.