. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?" “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.