“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.”

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.

A book, as it were, closes the book.

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.

I don’t at all search for an ideal woman, but several ideal women.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Hip-hop is really standoffish. It’s really competitive and it’s really about who’s number one all the time. Sometimes it gets out of hand.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

All right, your knees may be knocking but that shouldn’t prevent you from going ahead and doing what you need to do.

At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.

I need not instruct you of my belief: Time gives all and takes all away ; everything changes but nothing perishes ;