Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

From this point on in our lives, she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls.

Michael Ondaatje

Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does 'life', but not so mind.

Erwin Schrodinger

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

Henry J. Kaiser

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

Sir Walter Raleigh

You can do one of two things; just shut up, which is something I don't find easy, or learn an awful lot very fast which is what I tried to do.

Jane Fonda

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America.

Florence King

Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.

Simon Raven

I don't want to lose my fitness. I'm 45. I have two babies. I've got a long way to go and I want to keep in tiptop shape. There's no magic bullet.

Marcia Cross

The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope.

Bertrand Russell

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

Neil Gaiman

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

At the moment I'm enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I'm also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.

Deborah Bull