“Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.”

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.

It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.

Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.

Hard roads are not opened by themselves; they are opened by some brave people!

Only the hardest roads make us really feel that we are alive! Leave the easy roads!

I had a lot of hurts and confusions. You know, it’s hard when you’re a kid to be different. You’re all full of things, and you don’t know that it’s about.

Our generation is wonderful generation, full of wonder. It’s very hard to find an example of it in all our history. Composed of contradictions – light and darkness mixed.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader’s ear to hear anything of praise from him.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.