“A book, as it were, closes the book.”

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.

Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.

The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.

I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.

So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

There is a reason why all things are as they are.

As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

If you are in the same place today as you were yesterday, you are a backslider.

The thing about death is it’s so final, isn’t it, really? As far as we know… Nobody has ever come back and told us about it.

Be not entangled in this world of days and nights; Thou hast another time and space as well.

As the thoughts so the mind. If thoughts are good, mind is good. If thoughts are bad, the mind is called bad.