There is always time for another last minute

Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Mr Lipwig, there's a lady in the hall to see you and we've thanked her for not smoking three times and she's still doing it!

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.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult, and I decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces that I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.