My Small Boat

It is a false economy to burn your house down out of a desire to inconvenience your mother-in-law.

I May, I Might, I Must
If you tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.

Intercalate obligatory platitudinous plagiarism here.

I Am Not Yours
I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light. […]

Old Cary Grant fine, how you?

In reply to a telegram to his agent asking “How old Cary Grant?”

Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

When Socrates spoke, the people said how inspiring, but when Demosthenes spoke, the people said let us march.

Hilbert […] was perhaps the most absent-minded man who ever lived. He was a great friend of the physicist James Franck. One day when Hilbert was walking in the street he met James Franck and he said, “James, is your wife as mean as mine?” Well, Franck was taken aback by this statement and didn’t […]

Sir, I have been commissioned by Michael Joseph to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 to 1974

A letter from Jeffrey Bernard in the New Statesman 18 July 1975