“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.

There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

The United States is a madhouse.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

I can understand companionship.

I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.

Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.

Today’s art has been cancelled due to police activity.

If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.

I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police “first greeting”. “Oi!” I said “What do you think you’re doing?

It’s a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.

It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

Are they really gods?” “I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace – that makes them a police matter.

If I did things for the money, I’d have done adverts in the 1980s, when I was hot enough to be offered them, and ‘Police Academy 6,’ which I was asked to write.