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Quotes by English Authors
"Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude."
"At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails."
"Too often new ideas are studied and analyzed until they are suffocated."
"Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in "Old Maid"; the player who is finally left with it has lost."
"Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel."
"No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism."
"The hard thing is to stick to things when you have outlived the first interest, and not yet got the second which comes with a sort of mastery."
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
"Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking."
"So reports of my madness, as they say, were greatly exaggerated. Not that I give a bugger either way."
"The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law."
"Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."
"Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write."
"The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature."
"The academy awards in England; it's a classy affair as well."
"The house is in turmoil with records on every space. In the kitchen and in the dining room is covered with records. I don't have a big enough house to accommodate everything."
"I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong."
"What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?"
"Expect your every need to be met. Expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level."
"It is not very practical in today's world when you tour all over the place having a big band."
"Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes."
"It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea."
"If you invent the Mini Cooper, pour all your energy and passion into it and it gets made, you should be on a roll. In the film industry you have to start again the next day."
"The Chess-board must be placed with a white square at the right-hand corner."
"But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?""It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!...I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!"
"None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see."
"The presence of the Holy Spirit is the keystone of all our hopes."
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
"No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty."
"I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years."
"The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become."
"Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail."
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