“A little bird whispers in my ear: "Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.”

“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

“Who is the madder,’ Osman the clown whispered into hisbullock's ear as he groomed it in its small byre, ‘the madwoman,or the fool who loves the madwoman?’ The bullock didn't reply.‘Maybe we should have stayed untouchable,’ Osman continued. ‘A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.’ And thebullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.”

“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”

“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”

“My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.”

“Nobody can judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.”