when a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view.

Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence.

It's when most of the guests have gone that the party really gets interesting - peering under the table and into the bath to see who's stayed and what shape they're in. It is then that those who are still conscious divulge things you had not known before: sometimes about themselves, sometimes about other people and sometimes about you. It does not necessarily make pleasant hearing but it is always fascinating. In the relaxed atmosphere, in the wake of the hubbub, they unwind and grow confidential - nay, indiscreet. If they are not already, they end up as your closest friends.

Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.

I think the meaning of the universe is bound up with the egg. ... I am fed up with the meaning of the universe. Everything starts in the egg and ends in death. I think it's called 'the heartbreak at the heart of things.' But then perhaps our very mortality is an egg and at the moment of death our souls will emerge like damp chicks.

I have never had much trouble simultaneously entertaining diametrically opposed propositions, and welcome the possibility that this is not because I have one mind and am out of it, but because I have lots of them, all beavering away on their own.

I have frequently thought that the dead should be buried with all their belongings. It seems weirdly perverse that their clothes should still be here when the people you love best in the world have gone.