It's a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Eternity, sacred time.

The undistracted experience of affects of just about any sort, when free of practical consequences, appears to have intrinsic appeal for many of us.

Pray that the summer mornings are many when with such pleasure, with such joy you will enter ports seen for the first time

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.

Women of vanquished races are usually very prone to wed with the men who have slaughtered their kindred in battle.

What delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has seized me?

Active valour may often be the present of nature; but such patient diligence can be the fruit only of habit and discipline.

When conservatives talk about opportunity, they mean opportunities for the rich to get richer, for the powerful to get more powerful.

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

Think big and don't listen to people who tell you it can't be done. Life's too short to think small.