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

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.

An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.

The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,

Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.

Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.

f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!

I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.

There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.

And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

At the heart of every being lies creation’s dream of a principle that will one day give organic form to its fragmented treasures. God is unity.

One thing about me is I try to be honest.

My mom is the No. 1 person who has taught me to be courteous towards women.

Meat reared on land matures relatively quickly, and it takes only a few pounds of plants to produce a pound of meat.

The history of the kingdom of God is, directly, one of a reunion. The total divine milieu is formed by the incorporation of every elected spirit in Jesus Christ.

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.

People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.

There is so much more demand for Formula One than it can supply.