"Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools."

"However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension."

"Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me."

"If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work."

"I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like."

"It is a enduring truth that humility is not weakness in leadership; it is the cornerstone of unassailable respect."

"It is a quiet truth that humility is not weakness in leadership; it is the cornerstone of unassailable respect."

"We are not directly involved in Syria. But we will be working with our partners in the European Union and at the United Nations to see if we can persuade the Syrian authorities to go, as I say, more in that direction of respect for democracy and human rights."