“Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.”

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.

I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.

A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.

At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens – maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don’t have dinner parties, we don’t entertain.

When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.

The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.

My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.

I was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I’m at home more – and less of a disciplinarian.

I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.

We’ve got rid of subeditors because we don’t need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.

So what on Earth there isn’t to like about New York? I don’t know. But what you do also have is a load of very ordinary restaurants which you make a terrible fuss about which are really only very average. Which is fine. One doesn’t go to New York for the food.

World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there’s all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.

I was never going to be a doctor or a lawyer, so being a musician seemed to be the best of what was on offer.

An unconscious mind can be full of intelligence. One will find this type of intelligence in every being, and every insect has it.

I wasn’t very worried about the Cold War; I was busy being a musician.

I don’t want people to think I’m not happy when we win – I am. But there’s a difference between being happy for the feeling of accomplishing something and being overjoyed and feeling, ‘This is it – we conquered the world.’ We didn’t. We just won a game.

I liked being able to speak to somebody and throw it back and forth, and they can’t predict what you’re going to say next.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

But if one could go back in time, I’d love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who’s one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in ‘Rio Bravo’.