In comedy, falling means laughter. You can take something sacred and make it silly. The more sacred it is, the funnier it is. It has a bigger drop to fall.
I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.
There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.
We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.
Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.
My career as a critic still lay in the future but unconsciously I may have been preparing for it. They were not easy companions, these intellectuals I was now getting to know. They were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy. But they were intellectually energetic and - this particularly attracted me - they were proof against cant.
[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured.
If we are pure at heart, we would not wish one person well and not another. We should see there is no difference between one person or another. Then our pure thoughts can be evenly spread between all people. Sunshine can reflect on clean water but not on dirty water. God's light will be reflected by those persons with a pure heart.
When I don't feel free and can't do what I want I just react. I go against it.
People working on climate change should prepare for catastrophic success.
If we want to make progress in key areas now, we have to build a multi-stakeholder process, harnessing the appropriate energies. So not only the politicians but also business, the wider civil society, and the trade union movement all have a contribution to make, whether it is at national or at international level.