Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cleanliness is the scourge of art.
Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster.
By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.
For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.
Men know something that women don't know. Never ask directions of a stranger.
One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.
It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.
One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.
The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.
All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.
More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.
As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.
A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice.
Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away.
Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.
The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.
When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.
The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.
There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.
The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.
My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.
My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read.
The first thing I hear when I wake up is the sea, which is so close to our house that its reflections from the sun dapple our bedroom ceiling.
Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.
Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.
Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.
Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.
I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too.
Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.
Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.
Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.
In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.
It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.
Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.
There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.
Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.
Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.
Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.
In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.
Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued.
People think of waves as going in an orderly crash - whoosh - crash - whoosh, but in fact there are lots of different crashes and whooshes, all at different stages, and all going off at the same time.
You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.
As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.