Quotes

Don't sit around and wait for the opportunities to come. You have to get up and make those opportunities come.

What grows from our head is something that we should love. The larger society can love it or not, but it's not their decision to make.

Madam Walker's name gets thrown out as either the savior of black women's hair or she's the evil devil.

Women of African descent, since the beginning of time, have altered their hair, decorated it and used it to designate status.

There are two national historic landmarks: the Madam Walker Legacy Center in Indianapolis and the Madam C.J. Walker House in Irvington, New York.

The saying was that Madam Walker made the money, and her daughter - my great-grandmother - spent it.

So, being a good man is not an exam or a qualification, it changes, and it incorporates being a good friend, a good father, a good employee, a good boss, a good neighbour and a good citizen.

If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Bald isn't like being ethnic or disabled. Everyone can and will make jokes about it and expect you to laugh good-naturedly, which you will.

London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren's churches and ushered in the Georgian city.

The part that makes you unique is the bit people will like or fear, fall in love with, or try to avoid.

I don't do dinner parties. I have people come to share the food I've cooked for the family.

People who don't believe in God are no happier than people who do, and those who do believe are no nicer than those who don't.

People who know there is a god and people who know there isn't live in exactly the same world. Same number of hours in the day, same weather, same football results. They both love their children and die of the same diseases.

Everyone has to go to a funeral at some time and you need to be dark and sombre, and in a black tie.

The real question is: if you knew there was a god, would you behave any differently? And if the answer is yes, then perhaps you should assume there is.

You don't have a choice about fashion or aesthetics - you're in it, whether you like it or not.

Boredom is not a thing. It's not a feeling or a condition. It is the absence of feelings, things and conditions.

The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.

People collect boredom, they hoard it, they wallow in it, hoping that one day it'll be of interest and become an effete ennui. Let me tell you, it doesn't.

The suit is the polite taming, the socialising, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those pointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical.

Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.

I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.

Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.

The London police have discovered that the best way to neuter demonstrations is not to move everyone on, or disperse troublemakers, but hold them close, cordon them into a diminishing space for hours and hours, as a sort of arbitrary al fresco arrest.