“To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”

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

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

To lose is not always failure.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

Trade is critical to us all – it ensures we have what we need to live, that the NHS gets the equipment it needs to save lives, and that developing countries can prosper.

It’s all about knowing the balance, because I like to remain somewhat of a mystery. You need to have that, you know what I mean?

If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past.

All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen too, the rest of the world.