She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes...narrowed them horizontally, not vertically.

I would just hear piano players and I would hear music, and just think - I don't just want to sit here and passively listen; I want to get inside it.

People will survive, and they will find happiness. Happiness only comes when you're not looking for it.

Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.

It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture. It could rain in a room this big.

Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.