“However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.”

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.

Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!

You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.

Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?

It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

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.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.

I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’

In your country club, your church, and business, about fifteen percent of the people are screwballs, lightweights, and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress.

That’s good news and the church should offer it wholeheartedly to anyone.

Most churches don’t have the resources for these tricks and inducements but are still bound to the imagination that church happens on a Sunday in a building.

As a parish priest of the Church Of England.

So every day till the end of this campaign, Ill answer any question anyone has on government, but if you have a question on religion, please, go to church.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion.