Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it. It was possible to live through the decade preoccupied by the mortgage and the pence you saved on your income tax. It was also possible for those of us who saw what was happening to turn our eyes in a different direction; but what, in another decade, had been a trip to the clap clinic was now a trip to the mortuary.

Derek Jarman

Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstaking

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of

Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper's curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable*.* Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no.

Terry Pratchett

The more you are able to forgive then the more you are able to love.

Stephen Richards

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Gore Vidal

Lockhart'll sign anything if it stands still long enough.

J.K. Rowling

The day you stop learning and creating must be the most boring day.

Samantha Barks

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meandering, but leads none of us by the same route

Charles Caleb Colton

I love artists like Jon B, but I don't wanna be compared to anybody. I'm just doing my interpretation of rnb and how someone like me should be doing it.

Brian Harvey

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

Jane Porter

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.

Christopher Hitchens