It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.