Alexander: No spunk, simple as that! Your brothers an army deserter! — Tom Stoppard

"I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him."

"This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. Its for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all youve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What were trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might...travel."

"To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus."

"It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting."

"It is a defect of Gods humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."

"Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still."