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.

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.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

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

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

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.