The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.

I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

As an old man...looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about...is suffering, affliction.

All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.

I have a very great respect for Americans, and having been a correspondent in this country, and I believe that Americans are people who respond much better to facts and truthful, genuine speculation, than they do to purely, kind of phoney, adulation.