Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
You are who you are when nobody's watching.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.
The short answer to that is 'no.' The long answer is 'fuck no.
The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
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.
I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.
Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else
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.
Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?
The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just a fucking lunatic.
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.
We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.
I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.
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.
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.
Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.
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 is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché 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.
I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing. I’M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF. I’m tone DUMB.
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.
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?
I also knew that he was the kind of anile little runt who, in foyers and theatre bars the West End over, can be heard bleating into their gin and tonics, "I go to the theatre to be entertained.
You have already achieved the English-Language poet's most important goal: you can read, Write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence.
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?
It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?
My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?
Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much.
Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’.
All gone. All anger quelled, all desire drained, all thirst slaked, all madness past.
There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.
Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.
We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects.
I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, "In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.
[his healing skills] ..lay in the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify
Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.
I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.
Late, Fry?’ ‘Really, sir? So am I.’ ‘Don’t try to be clever, boy.’ ‘Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?
