We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.
You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.
If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.
England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place. . . an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.
And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.
Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.
Whenever I hear a man talking of the advantages of our ill-used sex, I look upon it as the prelude to some new act of authority.
I don’t hate redheads! The millionaire men - wealthy men - never pick them. Every time I offer them they say no. I could say the most gorgeous redhead in the world and they’ll say no, they don’t want it. Now if you ask an Irish guy in Ireland, he says yes. Because that’s indigenous to that country.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.