“Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed."It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that's what thingummy said.""Who?""You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony... what was he called? Begins with an 'H'.""Homer?""No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key.”

“Why don't you go on, Mother dear?' he asked. 'It's such nonsense!' said his mother. 'I believe it would go on for ever.' 'That's just what it did,' said Diamond.' 'What did?' she asked.' 'Why, the river. That's almost the very tune it used to sing.”

“He had quickly happened upon the truth which many lonely contemporaries would never discover, the truth that everybody, simply everybody, was panting for it and could, with patience, be shown that they were panting for it. So Adrian grabbed what was to hand and had the time of his life genitally - focusing exclusively on his own gender of course, for this was 1973 and girls had not yet been invented.”

“Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen.”

“Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?”

“Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poemAnd he called it "Chops" because that was the name of his dogAnd that's what it was all aboutAnd his teacher gave him an A and a gold starAnd his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his auntsThat was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zooAnd he let them sing on the busAnd his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hairAnd his mother and father kissed a lotAnd the girl around the corner sent him aValentine signed with a row of X's and he had to ask his father what the X's meantAnd his father always tucked him in bed at nightAnd was always there to do itOnce on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poemAnd he called it "Autumn" because that was the name of the seasonAnd that's what it was all aboutAnd his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearlyAnd his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paintAnd the kids told him that Father Tracy smoked cigarsAnd left butts on the pewsAnd sometimes they would burn holesThat was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black framesAnd the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa ClausAnd the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lotAnd his father never tucked him in bed at nightAnd his father got mad when he cried for him to do it.Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poemAnd he called it "Innocence: A Question" because that was the question about his girlAnd that's what it was all aboutAnd his professor gave him an A and a strange steady lookAnd his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed herThat was the year that Father Tracy diedAnd he forgot how the end of the Apostle's Creed wentAnd he caught his sister making out on the back porchAnd his mother and father never kissed or even talkedAnd the girl around the corner wore too much makeupThat made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to doAnd at three a.m. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundlyThat's why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poemAnd he called it "Absolutely Nothing"Because that's what it was really all aboutAnd he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wristAnd he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn't think he could reach the kitchen.”

“Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.”