Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.

It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

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

Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it.

It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.

The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.