Life is not a theme park, and if it is, the theme is death.

Democracy is a gleaming Excalibur - let's not use it just to mend the toaster.

There's an interconnectivity between what's in the consciousness of cat and what's in the consciousness of us.

All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.

My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, ‘I want something.’ He didn’t know what it was. Not ‘I want sweets’, or ‘a can of Coke’, or ‘to watch the Tweenies’, or whatever it is they’re into now (I like Bagpuss), but ‘I want something.’ All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.

Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.