A month's salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.

I'm absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it's very hard.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"...you know'.

As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

P. G. Wodehouse... used, when in town, to solve the problem of the long walk to the post-office by the simple expedient of tossing his letters out of his window: his belief that the average human, finding a stamped and addressed envelope on the pavement, would naturally pop it into the nearest pillar-box was never once, in decades, shown to be unfounded.