“Whenever I’m out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think.”

Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.

Whenever I’m with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.

To be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren’s hands.

I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material – something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal.

And I had long ago become accustomed to being called ‘Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.

I’m at that age where I watch such things with two minds.

My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon.

Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.

I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation.

Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!

They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

Dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,–the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts.

We define thermodynamics … as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.

IF YOU WOULD BE FREE OF GREED, FIRST YOU HAVE TO LEAVE EGOTISM BEHIND. THE BEST MENTAL EXERCISE FOR RELINQUISHING EGOTISM IS CONTEMPLATING IMPERMANENCE.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.