“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.”

Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.

I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.

It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.

I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.

I used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don’t get angry any more.

I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn’t have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.

We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

I always say what I think to be amusing.

When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.

You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.

My sister’s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.

My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.

The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.

The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.

The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.

Then again, if the plant is slow growing, and you are getting older, you may want to start with a larger plant. I find myself buying larger plants each year.

HONY is one of the only things keeping people from getting lost in the matrix.

How I measure success is getting to make another record and being able to the come back to the same town and play again cause you sold out the last time.

I shouldn’t have called out Will Ferrell, but I am getting a little fed up with these people.You want to support Bernie Sanders, knock yourself out. Does he know what Bernie stands for? Does he know what Bernie wants? And I submit to you, he doesn’t.

I am never happier than when I am on set and getting to act. And I can’t wait for what is yet to come.

Every generation I think gets better usually [in tennis].

I get highs, to be totally honest, in second-hand shops. My hunting instinct, I expect, really kicks in.