In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.

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.

The worst Persian voluptuary could never have imagined my most ordinary day.

Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums and those in cemeteries.

I say to this night: "Pass more slowly"; and the dawn will come to dispel the night.

Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do

What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action.

I am an old man and have had many worries, but most have never come to pass.

A hero is someone who stands in the community and speaks their hopes and speaks their passion. That's almost an act of heroism nowadays because higher consciousness is so trivialized.

The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God.

The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many.

To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.