If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there

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.

I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.