Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

As far as I know, you can fancy someone, you can enjoy their company or you can wish them well. But what being in love is, I don't know.

To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures - to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name - I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, 'And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?' I would never have dared reply, 'I'm just enjoying myself, Lord.'

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.