Obsessions of the Orient, of the desert, of its ardor and its emptiness, of the shadows of palm gardens, of the garments white and wide - obsessions where the senses go berserk, where nerves are exasperated, and which made me, at the onset of each night, believe sleep impossible.

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.

J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

Energetic action on debt would make a radical difference to the prospects of many of the poorest countries in the world, at no practical cost to creditor countries.

Kenneth Clarke

People should recognize who you are and how you can act rather then how famous you are.

Mae Whitman

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Warren Buffett

I don't actually own a car.

Chris Martin

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead androtten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.

Benjamin Franklin

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing thatpeople often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moralteacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing wemust not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesussaid would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on alevel with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be theDevil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, theSon of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for afool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at Hisfeet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronisingnonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

C.S. Lewis

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Hugh Miller

Even though you know a thousand things, ask the man who knows one.

Proverb

I have a very lively and colourful show. It's two hours of hits and the music speaks for itself.

Rod Stewart

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing--that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism: The weak and the failures shall perish. They ought even to be helped to perish.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

Mel Brooks