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.

Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

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.

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

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

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