The good news is that in every deck of fifty-two cards there are 2,598,960 possible hands. The bad news is that you are only going to be dealt one of them.

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we're chatting away, nice to see you.

I mean Buckingham Palace has never hired a professional public relations outfit let alone a Madison Avenue type and they would throw up their hands in horror at the very idea.

The winner is not the player who wins the most pots. The winner is the player who wins the most money.

Thatcher came under pressure from right wing backbenchers to shut up the Prince of Wales and there was a deal done between them where he did actually shut up in the end.

When the magistrate says 'That's not a good enough reason my man.' He said 'Excuse me, could I ask you? Have you taken an oath of allegiance to the Monarch?'

I think her friends were worried that the bulimia might come back, about some psychological slide, and she was given breathing space to some extent by the media as much as she ever has been.

What it was at the time was literally a plea for, to get the pressure off for a while, to give her space to breathe. She was very unhappy. She was feeling pretty claustrophobic.

The architect, Peter Arens who is the monstrous carbuncle architect, not merely did his design which had won a public competition never get built but his practice suffered financially for some years.

If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.

Don’t just wish and dream—take action to make it happen.

Genius as such can neither be explained nor treated away only at times its delay and inhibition and its perversion to destructive or self-destructive ends.

... one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. [p. 65]

God forbid that I should ever teach any adaptation of the Gospel. But I contend that we may serve it up in any sort of dish that will induce the people to partake of it

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

Well, The Rock says this, you should be concerned with fixing yourself a nice, tall glass of shut-up juice!

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

I think I'm a million different faces

Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.