“But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.”

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.

My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.

I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.

A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.

At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens – maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don’t have dinner parties, we don’t entertain.

When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

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.

The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.

My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.

I was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I’m at home more – and less of a disciplinarian.

I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

All the time. I feel like I’m not taken seriously.

I would have to read the script and feel for a character. And if I feel in my gut for a character, I know that that’s somebody I have to play.

I think that when you smell good, you feel good. You know how when you’re in a room and someone else smells good, you’re like, ‘Where is that?’

The life of faith is not only totally different from, but also diametrically opposite to, a life of feeling.