“Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.”

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.

The next Tory leader would have to unify his party and ensure that Britain stood tall in the world.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.

I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis.

I think it’d be disgraceful if a chap wasn’t allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went to Vegas and you didn’t misbehave in some trivial way.

I’d like thousands of schools as good as the one I went to, Eton.

Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.

My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.

He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well.

Can I say anything good about Ken Livingstone? A long time ago he did some good things, but I can’t now remember what any of them were.