It’s not until you’re older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.

I had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.

You have no future when the past rules you.

I think that everyone has something that they will kill for.

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

Once they have dedicated themselves to a cause, women will fight to the end for it.

If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people’s thinking.

the unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

But I came from a conservative Republican background.

The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved.

I never went out in the morning with the intention of getting drunk. It just happened.

Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.

Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.