There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that's all.

How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.

Of course it's all right for librarians to smell of drink.

I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.

The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.

Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

The ego hurts you like this: you become obsessed with the one person who does not love you. blind to the rest who do.

Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in all is the seal of unity.

Las Vegas is a SimCity game gone horribly wrong.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

I was a mess when the movie [Into the Forest] ended and I had to say goodbye. It was one of the hardest endings.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage.

Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And the moral of the story is I'm Thom Yorke.

I did absolutely love playing Tabaqui, the hyena, who is morally conflicted and a villain, but also quite sweet.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.