The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

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.

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

My countenance in my old-age does injustice to my heart. John Quincy Adams

The way Magnus’ breath had sounded, rattling in his chest, before he’d said his father’s name.

I'm blown away by how happy you make me. Thank you for being there for me when I'm stupid enough to think I'd rather be alone.

If the hairs on my neck stand up while Im writing, I figure the reader will get the same kind of shock.

I think, people are generally willing to imagine robots of all shapes, as humanoid robots are not practical.

I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.

We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.

Be grateful for blessings, Don't ever change, keep your essence. The power is in the people and politics we address.

I think from a very young age I always have this desire to perform.