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

When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.

One of the virtues of the NHS... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

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.