“Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.”

The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.

Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.

I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

Nature is none other than God in things. Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; whence all of God is in all things. Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.

What you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.

By helping others, you will learn how to help yourselves.

We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

When I listen to Amy Winehouse, I believe that her heart and soul is in the music, or if I listen to other British artists like Duffy or Estelle. The aesthetic of it is different, and it’s my point of view. It’s not anything formulaic.

We have much more in common with other people than we have apart.

I guess we’ll see how it turns out and which one overpowers the other… but I couldn’t really see my life without them, both of them.

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies.