Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.

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.

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.

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.

When alone, concentrate on the fruits of the solitude, not on the poisons of it!

Each day is the scholar of yesterday.

A monarch should be ever intent on conquest, lest his neighbours rise in arms against him.

The desert of virginity Aches in the hotness of her mouth.

Sometimes the ATP puts a lot of pressure on the players and sometimes you get injured because you play on a dangerous surface. Nothing happens, no one pays for that.

I really want to make art. I want to create something that's going to have a lasting impact.

If love doesn't make a fool of us, what will?

Percy (to Annabeth): If I was going to pick one person in the world to reattach my head, I'd pick you. Silena: Awww . . . Percy, that is so sweet! Annabeth: Shut up, Silena.

A writer writes what other people only think.