No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.