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

Being a personality is not the same thing as having a personality.

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.

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.

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.

My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.

If you’d been where I’d been… if you’d seen the things I’d seen!… you… you’d be me… Or someone following me around.

Such lightening and thunder will come there has never been seen before, bringing death and destruction.

I’ve always been completely autocratic. I’ve never learned to be diplomatic or democratic.

And just about anybody you can think of who has made country music has been on that stage. That’s what makes you so nervous.

That’s the way its always been and it will always continue to be that way.

Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing – but none of them serious.

It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.