“an optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.”

A butler in an English household should, however, be English, and as much like an archbishop as possible.

It’s always something to get one’s wish, even if the wish is a failure.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Fog and hypocrisy – that is to say, shadow, convention, decency – these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

Since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women.

All really frank people are amusing, and would remain so if they could remember that other people may sometimes want to be frank and amusing too.

As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.

Everything comes to the man who won’t wait.

Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from.

The Futurists?…. Well, of course, they are already past.

It depresses me, since naturally it gives the contrary impression. It can’t be real. It ought to be but it isn’t. If the noisy person meant what he said, he wouldn’t say it.

envy, as a rule, is of success rather than of merit. No one would have objected to his talent deserving recognition – only to his getting it.

To a woman–I mean, a nice woman–there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.

Looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin,

She could carry off anything; and some people said that she did.

It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights.

Everything is grounded in mystery. Everything is swimming, and the stable does not exist.

Do awards change careers? Well, I haven’t heard of many stories where that’s the case. It’s a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who’ve done well that year in certain people’s eyes, and it’s nothing more than that.

The Bible warns us clearly that we must not attack men of God no matter how sinful they may have become or wicked in our eyes.

You should see the eyes of some of those children when I say to them we’re going to have to open your head up and take out this tumor. They’re not happy about it, believe me. And they don’t like me very much at that point. But later on, they love me.

As an actor you have total rights to privacy and mystery, whatever your sexuality, whatever you do. I don’t see why that has to be something you discuss openly because you do something in the public eye. I have no understanding of why we turn actors into celebrities.

I know most players do, but I always keep both eyes opened. I still do it. I see two shafts, the real one and the transparent one. I look for what’s on the inside edge of the transparent one

The best hijab is in the eyes of the beholder.

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.