“It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.”

“I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.”

“I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it.”

“If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”

“They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?”

“To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.”

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”