We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.

There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.