I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?

If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

The Greeks understood perfectly that if there were divine beings they are capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious and mostly deeply unpleasant because that you can say well yes, all right, if there is going to be god or gods then you have to admit that they're very at the very least capricious. They're certainly not consistent. They're certainly not all loving.