Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Freud was just a novelist.
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
I never read in bed, only in my study.
Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
The best years are when you know what you're doing.
The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.
The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
People are much more interesting than people realise.
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.
Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.
A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.
Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.
I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.
I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.
I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.
The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.
To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.
Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.
The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.
If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.
There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.
It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.
When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.
There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.
Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.
I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to say. I haven't. I've got nothing to say. My opinion is of no consequence or value.
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism.