Like vichyssoise, revenge is a dish best served cold.

...as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.

It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is you know as Kipling put it. [...] To fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

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.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.

Nudity is a deep worry if you have a body like a bin bag full of yoghurt, which I have.