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.

I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there's a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that.

John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.

When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog.

It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.

I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.

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.