“Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.”

You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.

I’m good at reading people.

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.

It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.

Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.

Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

Since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

In the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‘This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.’ And then we can talk.

I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

It’s a funny thing about me. I don’t have any interest in food most of the time now.

There has to be a better way to meet those needs and demands than we are doing now.

I look at Rafa Benitez in his time at Liverpool, he had difficult periods and the same goes for Brendan Rodgers in the same job now.

There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all.

And Ritchie has now scored 11 goals.

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.