It's a treat being a runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do.

You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up - even if you want to stay where you are - and get you moving again.

If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.

Whatever people think I am or say I am, that's what I am not.

I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks.

The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life- a little life, I know- but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself

You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women.

All I'm out for is a good time - all the rest is propaganda.

Government wars aren't my wars they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about.

I'm me and nobody else and whatever people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.

Everybody thinks theyll never get married at your age. You think you can go on all your life being single, but you suddenly find out that you cant.

Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.