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.

Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.

God, stay with me, let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thoughts enter my mind that are not your thoughts, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.

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

I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.