With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

If you can't go where people are happier, try to make people happier where you are.

Having failed to conquer myself, my best hope now is to arrange an alliance with myself.

For some strange reason, no matter where I go, the place is always called "here".

In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful "post-war world" failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

What's most interesting about some books is the question: How did this crap ever get published?