"Although he was an intelligent man, I don’t think that he was a supreme intelligence. He had a sense of having missed a university education. He was working when he was 17. It may have been his choice because his father was not a poor man. I would not, to say the least, call him a frank man. He talked about a great many things and then would occasionally reveal little anecdotal aspects of his own life. He was not interested in our becoming buddies. He was avid for knowledge, which he hoped I possessed, and which I tried to give the impression I did. I don’t have any notion whatever of being omniscient."

"Kubrick wasn’t making a movie when I was working with him. He was preparing to make a movie, which is something quite different. Part of the charm of working with a director like Kubrick, if there is or was a director like him, was that during the privileged period before he even showed (the script) to the studio, it was just between him and me. You are sort of creating a game in the ball court of theory. There is no film being shot; there is no budget. It was in many ways a very exciting time. It’s also very fraught, particularly for a writer, because you don’t know if it’s going to be of any point."

"Who now reads novels as a guide to life and love? Everyone wants to star in his or her own movie."

"Modest successes are better known as failures."

"Some critics think the way I write is somehow disrespectful to food. But how can you write a restaurant column without being entertaining? You might as well not get up in the morning. People complain my sense of humour is puerile but the reason I have a job is because my sense of humour is puerile."

"Deep into his sixties (he never made it to his seventies), he would tap his fag hard against his brass Zippo like a soldier, toss it in his mouth, strike the flame on his thigh, spark it and exhale through his nose, then keep it clamped in his teeth as he typed, in line with the heavily marketed notion of the smoker as writer."

"I am very snobby. My family is Orthodox so I would never go to a Reform rabbi."

"The Jewish religion has it completely right in maintaining you should think very carefully about what you eat."

"I wanted to be a great literary novelist so that people would eventually talk about Alan Coren the scribbler and father of the great Giles."

"My dad was undeniably famous when I was a kid — he was on Wogan and Clive James and the radio every week, but as far as I was concerned he wasn’t famous enough. My best friend was Ben Brooke-Taylor. His dad Tim was in The Goodies — that was famous."

"I get so excited when I know I’m going to a good restaurant, then, when I do the review, I write myself up into such a frenzy that I have to go out and eat all over again."

"Your father bears an iron reed Filled with a flame that makes us bleed; Your kindly mother loves to tear Feathers and skin to deck her hair."

"from a tremendously vital white-hot fortissimo down to a trembling, limpid pianissimo so distant that it was difficult to sense whence the mysterious sound could be coming"

"We had no sooner taken our seats in the railway carriage and the train was beginning to move slowly out of the station when the guard came along the corridor and presented me with my viola! The porter had spotted it, reclining in its case all alone on the platform seat where Lillian and I had been busily engaged in conversation, run along the platform, and thrust it into the hands of the guard through the luggage van window as the train was moving off. Such was my absorption in Lillian that I could even forget the existence of my beloved and precious viola which had meant so much to me for so many years."

"You know the wild flowers suit your hair: Place hands full of the purple bloom Of loosestrife, glad of such soft doom, And tender-toned narcissus there"

"Come, take hands, you are not such As this will weary overmuch. Sit we down, and hear rehearse The marvels of the sweet-souled verse"

"Georg Solti: There isn't any. There isn't any for me. This is a question for amateurs. Amateurs have favorite symphonies. A pro never have favorites. The favorite is what I am doing now, today. That's my favorite."

"Charlie Rose: What's your favorite symphony in the world now? Sir-"

"Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find."

"In my orchestra, I hate slackness, idle talk and lost time. I always hated this and still hate it. But I can achieve much more when I am quiet and not shouting."

"Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician."

"Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense."

"From Toscanini I learnt the essential and desperate seriousness of making music."

"Reading is a wrestling with ideas greater than any we can create for ourselves. It has been said, a little extravagantly, that reading can get the better of most physical sufferings, all indeed save the pangs of hunger."

"Discriminating brevity is a law of the right biographic method."

"Every great national literature is a fruit of much foreign sustenance and refreshment, however capable the national spirit may prove of mastering the foreign element."

"I believe that the luxuriance of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct largely dominates that outburst of lyric melody which gives the Sonnets their life."

"Shakespeare avows, although in phraseology that is often cryptic, the experiences of his own heart"

"a purely literal interpretation of the impassioned protestations of affection for a "lovely boy", which course through the sonnets, casts a slur on the dignity of the poet's name which scarcely bears discussion"

"Shakespeare's relations with men and women of the court involved him at the outset in emotional conflicts, which form the subject-matter of his 'Sonnets'"

"He had a splendid appetite at all times, and never toyed with his food"

"The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of first-century Galilean Judaism.... Against this background, what kind of picture of Jesus emerges from the Gospels? That of a rural holy man, initially a follower of the movement of repentance launched by another holy man, John the Baptist. In the hamlets and villages of Lower Galilee and the lakeside, Jesus set out to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his generation and outlined the religious duties his simple listeners were to perform to prepare themselves for the great event."

"This is a simple and moving message, which Jesus formulated in his own language for his simple Galilean audience, about God, the heavenly Father, on the dignity of all human beings as children of God, on life turned into worship by total trust, on an overwhelming sense of urgency to do one’s duty without procrastination, on the sanctification of the here and now, and above all on the love of God through the love of one’s neighbour."

"If one had to single out the most revolutionary novelty furnished by Qumran, its contribution to our understanding of the genesis of Jewish literary compositions could justifiably be our primary choice."

"The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews."

"The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of the half a century of intense research that followed, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story."

"A question: when is a bed not a bed? When it is angled lie-flat. My back hurts, my legs ache and my clothes are all rumpled - and all because the airline, which claimed to have a bed, actually offered up a torture machine which I prefer to call a slide."

"I am not angry. I am just disappointed that, once again, a hotel has tried to convince me it will move heaven and earth to ensure I am comfortable when, in reality, it won’t even pass me the coffee pot!"

"I am tired of hotels promising to go the extra mile only to have them refuse to go round the corner!"

"The alembic of English tolerance has operated by now on the newer arrivals as well. Their sons have taken part in English life, contributed to English achievement, striven for England's betterment, shed their blood in England's wars."

"Abraham ibn Ezra, that restless, versatile Spaniard who wrote on almost every subject which could interest the medieval mind"

"The legendary missionary journey of St. Paul, which led to the foundation of the British church, presupposes the existence of a Jewish community - always the initial object of his propaganda - even before the capture of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70."

"The only exercise I ever take is walking up hospital stairs to visit friends who've damaged themselves by taking exercise."

"My first car was painted red down one side and blue down the other to confuse witnesses in case of an accident."

"Cricket is a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of Eternity."

"Before the War you took your secretary to Paris and called her your wife. Now, in order to wriggle through the tax-gatherer's net, you take your wife to Paris and call her your secretary."

"Nobody ever seemed quite clear whether the expression "drunk as a lord" should be taken as a compliment or an insult."

"I was called up in 1942. Having been born in Berlin, schooled in Devon, London and Berkshire, and lived in Suffolk, I ended up in the Highland Light Infantry."

"A gentleman is a man who never hurts anybody else unintentionally."