Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I had lost faith in biography.
A busybody's work is never done.
I don't write books inadvertently.
Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
I wanted passionately to be a priest.
Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.
In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.
I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.
History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.
People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.
I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
I'm starting to realize that people are beginning to want to know about me. It's a jolly strange idea.
It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.
I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.
As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.
IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.
I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
Like many people in Britain, I have an affectionate respect for the Queen, and am surprised that I should be having such republican thoughts.
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.
Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off 'Thought for the Day' when it comes on the radio.
If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations.
I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
If only Queen Elizabeth II had the intellectual, political and linguistic skills of Queen Elizabeth I, many people would support giving her some of the powers of an elected president.