In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.

...no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

She folded her arms and then shouted, "Right you thieving scunners! How dare you steal Miss Treason's funeral meats!" "Oh, waily, waily, it's the foldin' o' the arms, the foooldin' o' the aaaarmss!" cried Daft Wullie, dropping to the ground and trying to cover himself with leaves. Around him Feegles started to wail and cower and Big Yan began to bang his head on the rear wall of the dairy.

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

They obeyed, as wise men do when a woman puts her foot down . . .