“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”

“The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.”

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in ...”

“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”

“The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also h...”

“Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.”

“Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make the...”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.”

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”

“There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in ord...”

“Unlike written words which can mend those leaving the tip of your tongue never bend.”