More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

It helps if you don’t think of them as human. More than one officer has called this job pest control.

Man, it was a good thing vampires didn't get cancer. Lately he'd been chain-smoking like a felon.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.

Alas, all too often, the dream turns into a mud puddle. I am left looking at a disaster. What to do! Keep working. I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me.

I'm driven by issues, not driven to be political.

No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Coincidence exists, but believing in it never did me any good.

Can she sing? She's practically a Florence Nightingale.

As soon as you see 'Dame' in front of someone's name, you get nervous, but Dame Maggie Smith is the most wonderfully gentle woman I have ever met. She never had a bad word to say.