The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

I always try to travel light.

Turn the cell into a classroom and the prison into a university

It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.

The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.

When you get older, you have a much better sense of when it's time to really recognize that you're fortunate and that you should appreciate your circumstances.

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

Get on your knees and pray, then get on your feet and work.

Working together is success.

I'm sort lucky in that for me, I'm a writer now. I started as an actor but I'm a writer and so things like 'Wilfred' and shows like that are where I escape to.

Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.