... it has always seemed to me that books are the supreme decorations of a room

Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.

Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.

The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.

Why there you are, Stephen,' cried Jack. 'You are come home, I find.' That is true,' said Stephen with an affectionate look: he prized statements of this kind in Jack.

There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth

Compulsion is the death of friendship.

We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.

Jack, you've debauched my sloth.

Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.

Whenever I'm around him, all I can think about is how much more I want to be around him.

The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying. This is America, not Saudi Arabia.

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

If you ask me why I've succeeded it's because I was in the Royal Marines. You have this unbelievable sense of achievement and of overcoming adversity. That's the confidence it breeds.

I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.

I think to be a successful comic, you have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally perceptive.

Some of the funniest people I know are not screwed up in the head.

All I am certain of right now is that I don't want to go anywhere, and that's not bad for someone who always used to run.

Earthly greatness is a nice thing, and requires so much chariness in the managing, as the contentment of it cannot requite.

I cannot live without flowers everywhere. I grew up having a big garden, the size of a city block, in Rombas.