To be able to walk out the door when you come home from a job and wander into the garden to do a bit of watering gives you time to be creative in your mind.

The very best hotel I've stayed in is the Intercontinental on Park Lane. We went there for the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, and it was sheer luxury. Everybody had a smile on their face. I came home and changed all my pillows because the hotel ones were so beautiful.

When I was paralysed by polio at 13, I went into an isolation hospital and couldn't sit up, so I only took liquid food from spouted cups which the masked nurses would bring in and feed to me. I saw my parents only through glass; we couldn't touch.

I mainly cook British food with a few things I've had on my holidays. I went to the Canary Islands a few years ago, and we had all sorts of different mushrooms on brioche with pancetta on top, and it was delicious. I had it most days for lunch, so I thought, 'I'll do that when I get back,' and now it's in my cookbook, an absolute favourite.

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Fortune favors the audacious.

The desire to write grows with writing.

Your library is your paradise.

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

Man is to man either a god or a wolf.

It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn't have it, to fear and suspect the worst.

Women, can't live with them, can't live without them.

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

To know nothing is the happiest life.

Good order is the foundation of all things.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Education is the cheap defense of nations.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

You can never plan the future by the past.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

The traveller has reached the end of the journey!

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.