To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

Believe in yourself and power of your dreams.

The Muppets have such a great tradition of bringing together all of genres of actors and all ages of actors.

Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateurs drunks, the bores.

Being the number one pick was a great opportunity and meant a lot to me.

I'm interested in avoiding two types of behaviour [in my children]: one is the sense of guilt and the other is a sense of entitlement. If these two are avoided, then the rest is up to them.

It had never once occurred to me that the paper I wanted to work for would not want me. Certainly I never expected to be rejected solely because I was a girl!

The middle of life is the testing-ground of character and strength.

I can't always be making "British films". Why should we be making films about corsets and horses and girls learning to drive when Americans send over an event movie and make five or 10 million?

In romance, there's nothing more attractive to a man than a woman who has dignity and pride in who she is.

I've always believed that conservatism is the politics of reality, and that reality ultimately asserts itself in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position.