Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.

A man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.

There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon.

Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better.

The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they're being duplicitous.

I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid.