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

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.

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.

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

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.

10.30 Newsnight: What Are The Chances Of World War Three Breaking Out After You Have Gone To Bed?

Jacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren’t called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)

When I leave a room, it’s gonna be footprints of funk wherever I stepped, because I’m a soul-funk crusader.

Success always leaves footprints.

We all leave footprints as we journey through life–make sure yours are worth following.

You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time while sitting down.

When you’re offstage, that’s the footprint. That’s the man God’s gonna judge.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.