The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. 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.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call “the trouble with you.” Nevertheless, the journey is worth making.

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.