Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.

I'm an armchair kind of guy, especially when it's raining, which it always is and always will be.

The outfits come and go but there is a constant that I like about the catwalk model: the snotty expression.

If you want to be happy for a short time, get drunk happy for a long time, fall in love; happy forever, take up gardening.

My eyebrows could do with a trim.

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

I see my large nose, like half an avocado. I broke it falling downstairs when I was six, and it now resembles a large blob of play-dough.

It is more interesting to be compared to someone famous, because it lets you gauge what perceptions people have about your appearance.

An uninspiring canvas becomes a glamorous masterpiece when it is reattributed to a better-known artist.

The moon puts on an elegant show, different every time in shape, colour and nuance.

Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

Education is not limited to any age

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

School is a hospital where people recover from ignorance

I realize that no one is going to come to me and ask me to be Julius Caesar or a romantic lead, but I think I'm a certain type of guy who looks a certain way, and that's just the reality of things.

Americans are always mortified when I tell them this, but in England, it's a tradition to put your plaques and photographs and awards and gold records and stuff in your bathroom. I don't know why.

Any religion is a perspective upon existence.

[On retirement savings:] Gone today, here tomorrow.

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

Pain is a great teacher, but most of us would rather learn some other way.