No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Damn it all you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.

The history of time is captured by poet, artist, writer, photographer…!

It must be tempered with discipline. Ferocity is useless unless employed in the proper place . . .

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

My hobbies away from horse racing would be reading and painting; I love art.

The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books.

'All Over Me' is a song that I really got fired up the first time I heard it: it just really moved and it really had a lot of energy.

I can lick my elbow. I know that's supposed to be impossible, but I can do it!

Always carry through an attack when you have started it.

How can there be too many typefaces in the world? Are there too many songs, too many books, too many places to go?

I don't play online games. 'Warcraft,' I've played that, but I mainly play action games.