The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

We grow when the walls press in. We grow when life steals our control. We grow in darkness.

I'm working from the assumption it's going to go horribly wrong. If we get out of here with limbs intact and no aspen slivers in uncomfortable places, we're calling it a win."Merit/Jonah

Schedule a sacred date with yourself. You deserve time for your life.

Look at The Rock's competition! Look at him! It looks like a big monkey came down here, took a crap, and out came Mankind!

The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more

Anchor your faith in the plain and simple truths of the gospel.

I'm shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I've done everything I can to avoid it.

My father hated rock and roll - hated it. My first real argument with my father was over the Rolling Stones. And he never, ever liked rock and roll. He just liked me.

Free voluntary reading results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development