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

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.

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.

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.

Blood sport is brought to its ultimate refinement in the gossip columns.

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in

Have you finished your column for tomorrow’s headline?” it was vee. She came up beside me, jotting notes on the notepad she carried everywhere. “i’m thinking of writing mine on the injustice of seating charts. I got paired with a girl who said she just finished lice treatment this morning.

Every newspaper feels it must have an astrology column, and even in the Carleton University bookstore this morning, I found books on astrology for sale.

We do have, I’m sad to say, a fifth column that is living within our own countries that is utterly opposed to our values, we’re going to have to be a lot braver… in standing up for our Judaeo-Christian culture.

I think I’m equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the “Letters and Tomatoes” column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.

To make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance,