I've never really liked the Yanks. ... You can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football.

Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

In my experience, what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.

Jesus won't cut you off before you're through With him you won't never get a crossed line, And when your bill comes it'll all be properly itemised He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life. The phone line to the saviour's always free of interference He's in at any hour, day or night And when you call J-E-S-U-S you always call toll-free He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.