“I think it's important to go (to church every Sunday) and sit and think about something other than yourself, pray for the sick, consider the dead.”

“Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.”

“You don't go to church for intellectual gratification - you go because it pleases your aesthetic sensibilities.”

“Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.”

“What happens now is that if some unfortunate man goes to bed with some woman, overnight there's a divorce. He thinks and feels about the authenticity of his being, then they have to get married. So they just end up having serial marriages, which is distressing for the children. It would be much better if people just put up with the guilt of having erred and shut up.”

“I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.”

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”