I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

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.

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

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.

Happiness is a perception of what you have, not what you should have.

Everyone wants everyone to be perfect for them, but they don't want themselves to be perfect for others...

Happiness is overrated. There has to be conflict in life.

The people of Disney are so incredibly amazing they are so nice.

The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

I'm a Republican and I'm gonna stay a Republican because they need somebody like me to stay in the Party and keep hammering away.

Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.

Of course there are always exceptions, but opinions are not to be feared.

I'm never content with what I do. I live in a sort of permanent dissatisfaction. I think that's the secret to doing things well.

Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.