“I prefer not to elaborate on the various stages of our dealings over the next few days - disbelief, anger, recrimination, the raking up of old sores, bitter silence and so on - but I can say that t...”

“Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as t...”

“When we westerners pray we join our hands, close our eyes, kneel, hunch up and put our hands over our faces to close up our bodies. Our God is inside us, his universe inside our heads. When Orthodo...”

“For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch ...”

“Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The const...”

“For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.”

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so?There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”

“Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector...and miss.”

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”

“Your love intoxicates me into an intoxication of intoxicating intoxication.”

“Even as it clouds our corporeal vision, intoxication clarifies our spiritual vision. The mind, set free from the heavy bondage of the body, flees away like a prisoner whose guard has fallen asleep,...”

“Even as it clouds our corporeal vision, intoxication clarifies our spiritual vision. The mind, set free from the heavy bondage of the body, flees away like a prisoner whose guard has fallen asleep,...”