Glory never arrives through the front door. She sneaks in uninvited round the back or through an upstairs window while you are sleeping.

It's enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you'd be mad not to loathe them.

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

...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.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture

It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing.

You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.

You should give up.' 'Why?' 'For one thing, you'll live longer.' 'Oh, you don't live longer. It just seems longer.

I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.

I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party.

It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

If you have been, I'm glad you've stopped.

When push-off comes to shove-off, a man must have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings, something more than the threat of bedsores, at any rate.

Not one word of the following is true

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

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

Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave

I have Van Gogh's ear for music

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

My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

You'll often hear the phrase "science doesn't know everything." Well, of course it doesn't know everything. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean that it knows nothing.

Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind.

Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

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

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.

Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.

Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

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.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?

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

Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.