Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to its lighter fancies.

Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with a torpedo or a toy.

We are the only living creatures who can create a context, and as far as we know, everything else can only follow a context, without recognizing the context as such. Herein lies the source of creativity and the genuinely new.

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

I wasn't interested in sport or anything obvious, so I didn't stand out. I was interested in music, but I couldn't read music, so I wasn't allowed to do the GCSE. I was interested in painting, but no one's interested in a 16-year-old boy who's interested in painting. I wanted to get out of school very, very quickly.