“Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.”

I’ve never not been famous.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?

In England, nobody’s your friend.

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:

You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.

People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’

I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.

He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

Before GOD,no god,after him,there will be no GOD.

Maybe forced retirement isn’t necessary after all.

After long drought when rains abundant fall, He hears the herbs and flowers rejoicing all.

No matter how much strong black coffee we drink, almost any after- dinner speech will counteract it.

I’m working on my craft, and it’s really good for me, and I feel good after I do it.

And we shout with the others, When we should keep our mouths shut. Why? After all, we do only go around once. There’s really no time to be afraid. JUST DO IT.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service.

It was Vito, Carl Franzoni, Sue, Beatle Bob, Bryan Maclean and me…people would come to Ben Frank’s to hang out with us after we played shows.