He was just trying to tease me - I knew that later - but he said he'd have to leave because it wasn't fair to have anyone in the room who was going to make fun of what he had to say. He had a good sense of humor really.

Everybody sooner or later will have to go under the knife. Let's hope they make out as well as I did.

It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in of course and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house that was done many thousands of years ago.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

I was coming home from kindergarten - well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves.

I think there was a revolution in poetry associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

The history of the last century shows as we shall see later that the advice given to governments by bankers like the advice they gave to industrialists was consistently good for bankers but was often disastrous for governments businessmen and the people generally.

I suspect the psychological pressure associated with that crisis caused the first mental blackout I had ever suffered. It contributed to a deterioration in my health that later required the insertion of a heart pacemaker.

My father was a small-town banker. He became very ill when I was 10 years old and we went to California three years later in an attempt to recover his health which never happened.

Nevertheless whether in occurrences lasting days hours or mere minutes at a time I have experienced happiness often and have had brief encounters with it in my later years even in old age.

The great thing about suicide is that it's not one of those things you have to do now or you lose your chance. I mean you can always do it later.

All my graduation money went to paying for bartending classes so I could have a side gig. I bartended for two months before I was supposed to move to New York and then two months later I got the job as an understudy in 'Sister Act' and haven't looked back since.

I didn't get my degree at NYU I got it later they gave me an honourary one.

It's dismaying to see the unilateralism that the government is doing.

Where there is little or no public opinion there is likely to be bad government which sooner or later becomes autocratic government.

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.

Sooner or later man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying even if by chance they are later proved right.'

But sooner or later I'd love to do a comedy. I mean I think that you know people don't think that that's in my wheelhouse because I've sort of played a lot of dramatic stuff and that's certainly a side of myself that I want at some point in the right context in the right stuff that I find really funny.

It's funny when people talk about the 70s I can tell you the year of every album but when it comes to the later efforts I can't remember the exact years it's funny isn't it?

I had to act in a school play when I was about ten years old. I really didn't want to do it. But everyone had to do it so I didn't have a choice. A talent agent came and watched it and later gave me some work. It's funny because I'd always known that I wanted a movie career. I just didn't think that I would be in the movies.

I hate housework! You make the beds you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.

In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life.