“Small children do not belong at an adult party, and especially should not be used like trained midgets to help serve martinis.”

For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth.

I didn’t get ahead by sleeping with people. Girls, take heart!

I don’t know about you, but I can never get enough David Letterman.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters – and with much the same defensive mechanisms.

Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.

A conversation isn’t a competition.

The origin of a modern party is anthropological: humans meet and share food to lower hostility between them and indicate friendship.

When your child is in trouble, the first thing you do is blame yourself.

But for Muslims, everything that they don’t have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.

For a man who likes to talk, Fidel Castro does very few interviews.

The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.

A job is not a career. I think I started out with a job. It turned into a career and changed my life.

A Hot Fudge Sundae and a trashy novel is my idea of heaven.

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.

Half of my mum’s family is Welsh. I remember when I was a kid she used to read to me, and witches and wizards in books always had a Welsh accent, so I guess I took it from that really.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

Rebounding wins championships, you need to emphasize it and work with kids on it.

A lot of children don’t find forever homes because they’re on that special-needs list, even if it’s because of something as simple as her mother smoked cigarettes for a month, not knowing she was pregnant.

When a mother asks for a second child her body forgets the pain of the first. When I give you a second chance my heart is being forgetful.

Gratitude is really, really attractive. A child who is genuinely grateful makes you want to do anything for her, and that is true of adults as well.

We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.

I would have been a terrible mother because I’m basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.