“We are all of us lost. The best we can do is make whatever we're lost in as much like home as we can.”

“... we have given you a world as contradictory as a female, as cabbalistic as a male, a conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven, revolving in the ballroom of the skies glittering with conflict as diamonds: we have wasted paradox and mystery on you when all you ask us for is cause and effect!A copy of your birth-certificate was all you needed to make you at peace with Creation. How uneconomical the whole thing's been.”

“We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.”

“I seem to wish to have some importanceIn the play of time. If not,Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,My web of nerves, my wondering brain,to be shaped and quickened with such anticipationOnly to feed the swamp of space.What is deep, as love is deep, I'll haveDeeply. What is good, as love is good,I'll have well. Then if time and spaceHave any purpose, I shall belong to it.If not, if all is a pretty fictionTo distract the cherubim and seraphimWho so continually do cry, the leastI can do is to fill the curled shell of the worldWith human deep-sea sound, and hold it toThe ear of God, until he has appetiteTo taste our salt sorrow on his lips.And so you see it might be better to die.Though, on the other hand, I admit it mightBe immensely foolish.”

“But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can’t we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me.Oh God, perhaps it really is just me.Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.”

“I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.”

“I am very much in love with something;What it may be I can't remember;It will come to me.That was a roundabout drive in the snow,Owing to my erratic sense of direction!”