Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn’t. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and...

…Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It’s that kind of fight. … And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

It’s the strangest thing about this church – it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude....

Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian’s lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man’s truths – if other men had truths – and he believed...

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful...

You are who you are when nobody’s watching.

Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles – I recall the...

An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the...

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,...

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That...

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

Read it wisely, Little One, for the power of ignorance is great.

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough...

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins – is self pity. Self pity is the worst...

I cannot bear natural light when I’m writing.

He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than...

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning;...

There can’t be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn’t room. There can’t be.

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t

You can’t just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the...

I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief.”And you so intelligent!””Excuse me?” said...

My first words, as I was being born […] I looked up at my mother and said, ‘that’s the last time I’m going up one of those.

It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it...

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on...

But you can’t argue that the world isn’t in an unhealthy moral state.””Wouldn’t think of it dearest. People lie, cheat, rape, swindle, kill, maim, torture and destroy. Bad thing. People also pop into bed together...

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert’s seventh symphony. And I’ve rigged it up so...

But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree – can’t we? –...

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light...

Nobody seems to understand that in such matters the tact and sympathy should come from the one who is about to die, not the poor bugger who has to take the news.

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky...

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could...

The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything is blamed on ‘the barbarians

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and...

… Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas… And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the...

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because...

[his healing skills] ..lay in the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify

Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic...

Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed.”It’s memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the...