“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 think unionization of labour is a great thing.

I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.

Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.

I’m just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.

As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.

Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.

Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.

Gentile smoked salmon is all… muscular and smells of smoke. It’s not very fatty. They don’t understand – smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can’t believe how delicious it is.

People like me make modern life intolerable.

He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.

I have a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.

What’s more confrontational than burning cities for almost a year?

It’s a kind of madness in cosmopolitan cities now.

A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

I’m from Samoan heritage, and with the rugby in our blood and everything,

In London, you’ll be walking around and, ‘Oh, there’s the ground.’ Every area of the city has a Premier League club. They all survive; they all exist with enough money, and that’s good.

In England, you have stadiums in the middle of the city.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.