“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.”

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.

Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.

I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.

I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.

Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?

Across Europe, there are six times more cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths…by 2050…Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year.

You are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.

Or we can keep moving forward with President Obama’s vision for a growing economy that works for middle-class families in North Carolina and all across the country. For me, for North Carolina and for America, it’s an easy choice.

It is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

If I threw across my body, I would step on the chair. Marv was trying to hurt me. I fooled him. I started stepping the right way.

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.