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.

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.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.