If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.

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.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

The only species of human beings that are immune to failure are those that are dead and gone. Failure is constant

I stared you chew down your Swedish meatballs. I hope you could see how you chewed my heart then spit it out

Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.

School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I don't watch any television, hardly ever because I'm so busy. I always obviously watch my shows because I blog about it and talk about it, but no, I can watch the news in the morning and that's it.

No, I never saw an angel, but it is irrelevant whether I saw one or not. I feel their presence around me.

I'm not prepared to make any comments on the World Cup in Qatar in 1922.

The best films in the world, you've got to beg and plead and try your best to get.

Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.