Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?

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.

Friends and fire didn’t go well together.

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.

There is never one absolutely right thing to do. All you can do is honor what you believe, accept the consequences of your own actions, and make the best out of what happens.

I love Hank Williams. Who doesn't love Hank Williams? So my choices are not that surprising.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.

He who is ever brooding over result often loses nerve in the performance of his duty.

Science teachers and the mentally ill, that's all Jazz is for.

Know your goal, make a plan and pull the trigger

It's weird how time can change something you thought would always stay the same.