Like a Frenchman, far from home, catching a whiff of Gauloise.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

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

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

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

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.

Knowing those things are going to kill you," she said, "and still you do it." "How differently I might behave," Tom said, "if immortality were an option.

It was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

It is a clich that most clich s are true, but then like most clich s, that clich is untrue

Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

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

It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind. - About "The Da Vinci Code

Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a child's milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whisky.

A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.

Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.

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

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.