Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.

"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers.

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.