“There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.”

As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.

Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.

Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.

Gentile smoked salmon is all… muscular and smells of smoke. It’s not very fatty. They don’t understand – smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can’t believe how delicious it is.

People like me make modern life intolerable.

He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.

I have a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.

I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.

The world’s most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn’t let us win at Monopoly… he wouldn’t cut any slack for his children.

Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.

All I care about is that people who like me think I’m funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.

Maybe it’s just getting older, but I don’t want to miss things.

We’re a little bit competitive and we want to make sure we’re on the top. We’re all working for the same goal as all these bands, we want to come out on top and I think we have accomplished that in a lot of ways.

I think I’m getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.

When you change showrunners, it’s like getting divorced and getting remarried.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.

I’m happy that I can focus on my body a little bit. I’m not happy to get surgery, but I’m happy that I can focus on getting better.

It’s a short letter – all she said was, ‘Hey, since it’s harder for you to go out these days without getting photographed, here $10 for a pizza.’ I was like, ‘Aww, she sent me money for a pizza so I could eat at home!’