My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

It's the oasis, " said the camel driver."Well, why don't we go there right now?" the boy asked."Because we have to sleep.

He said he preferred to feel the earth sing through his feet, and that shoes stopped you from hearing the song of the earth.

For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient.

The ecstasy of seeing her versus the agony of losing her, a million births and a million deaths.

Be slow in considering, but resolute in action.

There are only three things you need to let go of judging, controlling, and being right. Release these three and you will have the whole mind and twinkly heart of a child.

I can assure you full immunity is not on the table. But your hand is.

My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible. The job is to make people laugh. I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.