“I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad … he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.”

When Cameron’s Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.

Our friends in America will be at the front of the queue for trade deals.

In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can’t turn the clock back to 1904, what’s the point of being a Conservative?

If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn’t ever get anywhere.

Some people think that it [Brexit] is the end of the world. It’s not. On the contrary, it’s a massive opportunity for this country.

All the people I talk to, increasingly, can see that the emperor has got no clothes. The case for leaving [the EU] is now overwhelming.

I would ban sweets from school – but this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much.

We celebrate the contribution of people who have come to this country to make it better.

It is easy to make promises – it is hard work to keep them.

Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.

My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.

It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.

This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt. But it is a moment for hope.

I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.

London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don’t originate in this country.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they

Even if you make mistakes, I go back to those things, my not-so-great moments because those are my truest moments; those are my human moments. I’m not even mad at the things I said that were a little dicey.

I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.

We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.

It’s true Fang and I fight, but we’ve never gone to bed mad. Of course, one year we were up for three months.

All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen too, the rest of the world.

They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn’t inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams.