“Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.”

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.

Most unmarried people have no idea what it takes to make a marriage work; they grossly underestimate the price people have to pay to build long-term, mutually satisfying relationships.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

What I’d like to do now – well, what I’d like to do now is grow my beard very long, weave it into my pubes and strum it like a harp.

Most people are in favor of change, as long as they can continue to do things the same as they always have.

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

Now that I’m afraid was institutionalized, and the great thing about the Canadian content regulations is that it broke that open.

As you get older, your voice changes, as well. Your voice should be able to last as long as you last.

Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.