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.

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.

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.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

I define coaching as launching the salesperson on a voyage of discovery by asking questions.

In fact, I think 500 years from now, the two Americans so far who will be remembered are George Washington and Neil Armstrong, who, amazingly hasn't been paid very much attention.

Hollywood-a place where the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure

Golf is the only game in which a precise knowledge of the rules can earn one a reputation for bad sportsmanship.

Beginning in 1978, Nike paid coaches to put their shoes on the team.

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.

I knew that whatever I set my mind to do. I could do.

I tend to stay up very late at night, so I wake up later in the day. This allows me to be in the middle of my workday when I am onstage at night.