Tears have a better character cried alone. Pity can sometimes be more wolf than dog.

That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.

I haven't really written my plays and books - I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood.

The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.

He loved telling stories. He had been everywhere in the world. The northwest frontier, the landscape of the Hindu Kush, was one of the great landscapes of my childhood because he used to evoke it with his stories. He taught me the sequence of ranks in the British army when I was about eight. I was in the bed with him while he told me everything about his life - except, probably, the real things, because of course you couldn't go there.

After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.