Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Listen with your eyes as well as your ears.

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance and does not object to sharing.

So much one man can do that does both act and know.

Religion may become a fashion as well as anything else; and, when it does become so, it has as little to do, in those who thus hold it, with the heart and the character as any other fashion.

Part of being an actor is letting things come about organically as opposed to forcing them.

Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.

A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.

Everyone can walk and talk. Your job is to create magic.

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king; Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing. Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!