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.

His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.