“We wouldn’t want to be like the Swiss, would we? That would be awful! We’d be rich!”

I am delighted at Des’s support in these elections. And thank him for his rewrite of the lyrics of Send in the Clowns which we are planning to sing at our South East conference.

British chancellor is telling the rest of Europe it must abandon democracy. It’s appalling.

Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.

I know there’s an online petition to have another referendum [like Brexit] but I think honestly I think if people want to go for it a little further down the line it would be a hiding for nothing.

I think that politics needs a bit of spicing up.

We must break up the eurozone. We must set those Mediterranean countries free.

It is virtually impossible for what you are voting on to remain as it is currently. There could be huge changes to the treaty and there could be huge changes to the euro zone itself.

It’s the FSA and its plethora of EU bodies that’s failed.

Nobody in Britain has voted for 4 million people to come here in the last 15 years, and for probably another 3 million to come between now and 2020.

There are two completely different Britains. There’s London, and there’s the rest of Britain.

The great and the good will decide what is good for us and make sure that we get what is good for us, good and hard.

Minimum sales prices for alcohol are a startlingly bad idea. As with excise duties, the effects are regressive.

It’s a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.

This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.

Puppet Papademos is in place, and as Athens caught fire on Sunday night he rather took my breath away – he said violence and destruction have no place in a democratic country.

If an idea is indeed sensible, it will eventually become just part of the accepted wisdom.

I don’t know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel’s Bolero. Too bad – this is how I hear war.

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

Man is an imitative creature.

Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It’s a weird combination of elements.

You know what I hate the most? People that imitate owls.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?