People From London

"My merry, merry, merry roundelay Concludes with Cupid’s curse: They that do change old love for new, Pray gods, they change for worse!"

"With that she dasht her on the lippes, So dyed double red: Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled."

"We thinke no greater blisse then such To be as be we would, When blessed none but such as be The same as be they should."

"Deep into his sixties (he never made it to his seventies), he would tap his fag hard against his brass Zippo like a soldier, toss it in his mouth, strike the flame on his thigh, spark it and exhale through his nose, then keep it clamped in his teeth as he typed, in line with the heavily marketed notion of the smoker as writer."

"I wanted to be a great literary novelist so that people would eventually talk about Alan Coren the scribbler and father of the great Giles."

"The Jewish religion has it completely right in maintaining you should think very carefully about what you eat."

"I am very snobby. My family is Orthodox so I would never go to a Reform rabbi."

"In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish."

"I get so excited when I know I’m going to a good restaurant, then, when I do the review, I write myself up into such a frenzy that I have to go out and eat all over again."

"She didn't ask me to the christening, so I'm not going to the wedding."

"Some critics think the way I write is somehow disrespectful to food. But how can you write a restaurant column without being entertaining? You might as well not get up in the morning. People complain my sense of humour is puerile but the reason I have a job is because my sense of humour is puerile."

"I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours?" "I left off struggling."

"My dad was undeniably famous when I was a kid — he was on Wogan and Clive James and the radio every week, but as far as I was concerned he wasn’t famous enough. My best friend was Ben Brooke-Taylor. His dad Tim was in The Goodies — that was famous."

"Judge: "You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?" Co-respondent: "Not a wink, my lord!""

"For Heaven's sake, send help! There's a man trying to get into my room and the door's locked!"

"I want to back the favourite, please. My sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways!"

"Do you like Kipling?" "I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled."

"'Isaiah' – what a funny name for a teddy bear!" "Well, you see one eye's 'igher than the other."

"Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby's feeding-bottle?"

"Can't see my little Willy."

"I like seeing experienced girls home." "But I'm not experienced!" "You're not home yet!"

"Sad is anywhere. It comes along and finds you."

"There must be candles."

"You ask me how it's possible for me to carry on. I wonder if I look like someone who looks like it's possible to carry on."

"Bloody music. I hate the way it infiltrates."

"I mucked about with his hair. His shoes were where he left them. His shoes are where he left them."

"It didn't work out the way it's supposed to."

"Sometimes because I'm sad I do bad things. I can't tell you what they are. They are too bad. And it's not fair on the cat.""

"People are good," he said. "They'll all be good to you. Except one."

"Respect is fatal, isn't it?"

"The competition between chunks of capital is getting fiercer, there is the same old same old desperate need to keep wages down, desperate need to substitute machines for labour (but that costs trillions of investment) and no matter how hard you exploit workers, you still need to sell stuff to them, and if their wages are low, they can't buy the stuff. You can force the poorly paid into borrowing money (credit cards, wonga etc) but there comes a point when that causes a credit crisis: someone somewhere says they want some dosh and a bank somewhere says they haven't got the dosh (Northern Rock, last time). Let's remember, none of this is caused by migrants or left social democrats. This is a crisis entirely born from a system that is locked into competition for markets. So, these fervid rows between squadrons of extremely unpleasant individuals are rows between people who deep down know that they can't control this system of running the making and distribution of the things we need. They are just coming up with fantasies on how to stay in power while the next phase veers from crisis to crisis. It is terrible for millions of people in awful insecure, low paid jobs and/or in insecure, lousy housing, or if they are disabled, or for millions trying to migrate their way out of poverty and despair. We should be alarmed when members of the ruling class start pleading with us to take sides with them against the 'elite': one section of the elite calling for us to oppose the elite."

"[W]hat possible objections can we have to anyone, anywhere, writing a book for children? After all, it's not terribly difficult. I'll rephrase that: it's difficult to write a brilliant one, but anyone who was once a child should have at least one children's book in them. Anyone who comes anywhere near children ought to be able to write at least one more. And in an ideal world, shouldn't every parent, teacher, grandparent, child-carer have a go?"

"I think human life is absurd. I think it is completely, utterly absurd. There is this planet and it's this tiny place in the universe and then on this planet are crawling over it these little people who think that their lives are so incredibly important and, you know, an enormous amount of effort is spent killing each other, which just drives me completely nuts when I think about it, and making people poor while other people have whatever they want, and it's utterly absurd."

"He wanted to make a mirror. Glass, mercury and a wooden frame- the perfect mirror. But he was no good at it. So he went to the people he knew and asked them for a mirror. All they could give him were bits of old mirror. He took these home, stuck them on a board and hung it up. It's a mirror."

"dear joe, your wild noisy huge brother is dead. I couldn't do what my parents did: bring two boys, four years apart through the maze."

"It's nice of you to say you'll always remember him. You won't."

"I'm what you might call centre-right but I've always disliked the right wing as much as I've disliked the left wing."

"I have been reading a book by my favourite author, Jeffrey Archer called "The Eleventh Commandment". I crave your indulgence to relate a small part of the book because it illustrates both the power of the media and the good it can do. It is fictional of course but it is nevertheless credible and may happen in real life. In this book the head of the CIA, one tough lady who used to order the assassination of an embarrassing foreign politician without bothering to inform the President, was castigated by the latter for the alleged CIA killing of a Presidential candidate in Columbia. The Director calmly denied that the assassination was by one of her boys. She then decided that the CIA hitman must be liquidated. The man was sent to Russia to kill another Presidential candidate, a particularly obnoxious ex- Communist. The CIA network then arranged for the hitman to be arrested by the Russians for attempted killing of the candidate who later won the election. The hitman will of course be executed since this is Russia, a country that has not yet heard about human rights and the cruelty of legitimately taking human lives. In the meantime the wife of the hitman contacted his secretary to find out where he is. The secretary being infatuated with our hero finally discovered that he is the man reported by a Turkish newspaper to have been arrested in Leningrad for attempted assassination of the Communist Presidential candidate. On her way to inform the wife she was killed through a road accident arranged by the CIA. When the wife finally discovered the fate of her friend, she rang up the deputy director of the CIA who promptly denied that he knew any such person as the husband of the caller or the secretary of the husband. When the wife pointed out that he was actually at her party recently and had talked to the secretary concerned he told her that she must be imagining as he does not know her or had been to her house. At this stage she came up with her trump card. It seemed her daughter had video-taped the party and there was a scene of him talking to the secretary. For good measure she said that the conversation she was having with the deputy director was being recorded and if he tried to dispose her off or to search for the tapes, the T.V. networks would receive full copies of the video-tape of the party and the telephone conversation. At the mention of the T.V. networks getting the tapes the attitude of the deputy director changed completely. Now you can see how the media can play a powerful role in ensuring that justice will be done and the miscreants prevented from misusing their power."

"Shakespeare avows, although in phraseology that is often cryptic, the experiences of his own heart"

"Discriminating brevity is a law of the right biographic method."

"Reading is a wrestling with ideas greater than any we can create for ourselves. It has been said, a little extravagantly, that reading can get the better of most physical sufferings, all indeed save the pangs of hunger."

"Every great national literature is a fruit of much foreign sustenance and refreshment, however capable the national spirit may prove of mastering the foreign element."

"He had a splendid appetite at all times, and never toyed with his food"

"a purely literal interpretation of the impassioned protestations of affection for a "lovely boy", which course through the sonnets, casts a slur on the dignity of the poet's name which scarcely bears discussion"

"Shakespeare's relations with men and women of the court involved him at the outset in emotional conflicts, which form the subject-matter of his 'Sonnets'"

"I believe that the luxuriance of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct largely dominates that outburst of lyric melody which gives the Sonnets their life."

"I chose to rewrite it in poetry because the original Ramayana was in poetry- the fact is, it’s sort of been corrupted into prose. In its original form it was an epic poem rather like the Iliad or works of that sort. Rather than traditional poetry, it was a verse novel, without a traditional structure. What I most wanted to do was to preserve the essential musicality of the lines. Especially as the Ramayana like so many stories, was based on a fundamentally oral tradition."

"Poetry was a meeting of mind and heart, I felt at one with poetry itself. I like the concentrated language, the play with form, and the way you can muck around with words in a way that you can’t in a novel. Poetry allows you to be intense, because to some degree people expect it."

"I didn’t want to write it in OED English…As I was writing more and more I was aware that I was having it filtered through to me from various languages, various religions, various countries, and so in a sense I wanted to present it from this Western, global perspective, to try and capture something multicultural."

"Look We Have Coming to Dover!"