My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

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

The people who say: 'You are what you eat' have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don't think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

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

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.