Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.