“It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.”

English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit.

A humorist tells himself every morning, “I hope it’s going to be a rough day.” When things are going well, it’s much harder to make the right jokes.

Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.

Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.

There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn’t all the water gush out when you get in?

Why they emigrated is not exactly clear, but many scholars believe it was because they saw the way Sweden was going, i.e. neutral.

But even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.

Kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden.

I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.

All I know of birds to this date is that sparrows are the ones that are not pigeons.

Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.

The Act of God designation on all insurance policies; which means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

I forced a smile. It was the one i’d been practicing all morning. It felt tight at the edges and brittle everywhere in between.

There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.

We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.

The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease.

I have always been confident in my skills and once the game got going I knew I was probably the best player on the floor most of the time whether it was junior high, high school or college. I knew I had control of the game.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.