You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.

I like the moment when I break a man's ego.

We should fight [mass immigration], we should stop it, we should be proud of who we are and define what we are not.

What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.

Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.

Music can be used against us as much as it can be used for us. Muzak can put a whole nation to sleep, whereas a lullaby is intended to put a child to sleep in a sweet way.

I could have an office all to myself but since my collaborators don’t have one, then I too am contented to have a desk in a shared room.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.

If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!