“In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.”

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.’

If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.

I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.

[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.

But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.

Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.

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

The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.

Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.

Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that.

A man with a financial background may know nothing about manufacturing shoes or cars, but he’s put in charge anyway.

Oh, from what heights of blessing it is possible for a man to fall! To what depths of sin a man can descend, even with all that spiritual background!

It tells us the truth about each one of them in order that against the background of human breakdown and failure we may magnify the grace of God and recognize that it is the delight of the Spirit of God to work upon the platform of human impossibilities.

With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.

Like it or not the American people support the term ‘background check.’

My mother’s background was Scottish.

Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.