So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you'll give a talk unless you know clearly what you're going to talk about and more or less what you're going to say.

I know it is utterly fanciful to expect professional cricketers to play the game like amateurs; but the trick, I believe, is taking the spirit of the amateur - of discovery, of learning, of pure joy, of playing by the rules - into our profession. Taking it to practice or play, even when there's an epidemic of white-line fever breaking out all over the field.

They encouraged me, the way I do others now, that if you really have something that you like to do, that’s what you probably should do. Despite what everybody says, that you can’t make a living, or that’s not practical, or a thousand reasons why you may not do this or this or this. If that’s what your heart says you should do, chances are that you ought to listen.

My advice to everyone is: “Become a journalist.” ... if you have a chance to be a newspaper reporter for three or four years — before you do whatever you want to do — do it, because you will know so much.

Well, again, getting back to Nietzsche’s statement, as a person of deep faith, I obviously believe in something in the end. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a great big something.

I don’t know. When I was a soldier I just didn’t want to be hurt. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt. So I suppose painlessly because I hate pain and I love sleep.

No. Well, I don’t know. It’s biochemical to be redistributed, certainly.

I’m lucky…that I’m free to do art, and presumably to keep my soul growing, by finding something else to do. Participation in the arts--drawing, dancing, and all that--makes the soul grow. That’s why you engage in it. That’s how you grow a soul.

I was going to be a journalist. But after the war I studied anthropology, just in order to become educated. I thought it was worth knowing the science of man. I still intended to become a journalist, but there were no jobs, because the reporters who had gone to war were coming back and were entitled to their jobs, and the women who had replaced them were damned if they’d leave, and they shouldn’t have left.

Yes, well, I’ve already said so in the books: “Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.”