Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age. – Jonathan Swift
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind. – Jonathan Swift
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning. – Jonathan Swift
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit. – Jonathan Swift
As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be. – Julie Burchill