“I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the respected patriarch of an ordinary English family.” “Very boring, Emerson.”

Children, I feel, are as much entitled to privacy as human beings.

Humor is an excellent method of keeping a tight rein on unproductive displays of emotion.

The trouble with unknown enemies is that they are so difficult to identify.

The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal – or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be.

I do hope you have some money. I’m getting tired of hitting people.

Emerson,’ I said, choosing my words with care, ‘it is a sheer drop from the cleft down to the base of the cliff. If you are bent on breaking your arm or your leg or your neck or all three, find a place closer to home so we won’t have to carry you such a distance.

I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).

I knew the answer, and–of course–so did Ramses. He has superb breath control and always gets in ahead of me.

The only way to do it is to do it: by writing, writing, writing.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

Spring is always cruel, with its false promise of resurrection.

People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration.

There is nothing sadder than the cheerful letters of the dead, expressing hopes that were never fulfilled, ambitions that were never achieved, dreams cut off before they could come to fruition.

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to – mostly the latter.

I do, however, think it would be difficult to write books I don’t like to read.

If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask. -Emerson

I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations – that’s why we got married really quickly.

It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work.

I unfortunately don’t speak French, but my wife is now fluent in English, which really reflects rather badly on me.

The German word ‘will’ is the English word ‘want,’ so that’s a little bit of the problem.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

The English game is not faster than the German game.

I’m really good at math and history, but I suck in English.

Four things are laid upon me: to drive out the English; to bring you to be crowned and anointed at Reims; to rescue the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orleans.