“You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters.”

“I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief."And you so intelligent!""Excuse me?" said tom"Knowing those things are going to kill you" she said "and still you do it.""How differently I might behave" Tom said, "if immortality were an option”

“Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love, all manner of sacrifice could be borne.”

“In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant—the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.”

“If the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.”

“Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you can get between the right man and the right woman.”