Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Anything that isn't opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn't matter.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.

Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.