Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.

I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.

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