I always drink at lunchtime. It helps my imagination.

I've not much faith in the future of the planet and I'm not just thinking about Mr. Bush or global warming. I feel that we've lost our way and it looks as if, in so many fields, things are turning sour. Even democracy is turning sour, isn't it?

There's always time for one more pint. - Chief Inspector Morse

We read so much about incompetence and corruption in all sorts of places. I'm not just thinking of the United Kingdom and the United States. Almost everywhere there seems to me to be an increase in incompetence and general dishonesty. This is what I mean about democracy - you feel that you've got the ability to arrange things and influence matters and it's not quite so easy as that, I'm afraid.

I write every day when I'm at home - trying to catch up with correspondence.

Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. "It's just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it's not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we've got a body - a body that died from unnatural causes. That's all I ask. And we haven't got a body.

There are terrible disasters and tragedies and miseries all over the place, in places like Africa with the atrocities in Darfur, India until recently, and China. So many of them have been brought to our notice by television that we've almost become inured to cruelty and disasters and hopelessness in the world. We don't seem to have made an awfully good job of running things as a sort of planetary cabinet.