“Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.”

English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit.

A humorist tells himself every morning, “I hope it’s going to be a rough day.” When things are going well, it’s much harder to make the right jokes.

Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.

Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.

It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.

There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn’t all the water gush out when you get in?

Why they emigrated is not exactly clear, but many scholars believe it was because they saw the way Sweden was going, i.e. neutral.

But even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.

Kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden.

I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.

All I know of birds to this date is that sparrows are the ones that are not pigeons.

The Act of God designation on all insurance policies; which means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It’s unbelievable.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater.

A brilliant inquiry into the contemporary Iranian predicament and what it means for the world.

Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues.

This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.