“The writer’s life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.”

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it.

Enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.

There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.

Indeed, if your pillow is six years old–which is apparently about the average age for a pillow–it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.

It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players – more if they are moderately restless.

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.

Life is ridiculous. It’s not our fault.

We in the media are just people with all of people’s faults.

Something goes wrong, I yell at them -‘Fix it’- whether it’s their fault or not. You can only really yell at the players you trust.

The people you don’t know turn out to be exactly like the people you do know, same faults, same everything.

It is a fault, not a virtue, to wish your humility recognized and applauded.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like.

Speak no evil, that thou mayest not hear it spoken unto thee, and magnify not the faults of others that thine own faults may not appear great.

You must purge yourself before finding faults in others.