"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."

"I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea."

"Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose."

"Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape."

"Sleep, Nurse of our life, Care’s best reposer, Nature's high'st rapture, and the vision giver."

"Sum up at night what thou has done by day."

"A good rider on a good horse, is as much above himself and others, as this world can make him."

"There [is] no little vigour and force added to words, when they are delivered in a neat and fine way, and somewhat out of the ordinary road, common and dull language relishing more of the clown than the gentleman. But herein also affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself, than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn."

"He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself, for every man hath need to be forgiven."

"I must no less commend the study of anatomy, which whosoever considers, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxal, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature."

"Let then no doubt, Celinda, touch, Much less your fairest mind invade: Were not our souls immortal made Our equal loves can make them such."

"Our life is but a dark and stormy night, To which sense yields a weak and glimmering light, While wandering Man thinks he discerneth all By that which makes him but mistake and fall."

"Now that the April of your youth adorns The garden of your face."

"Parents – especially step-parents – are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fufill the promise of their early years."

"People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding."

"Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed."

"[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing."

"Self-love seems so often unrequited."

"He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful."

"The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd – one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like – one writes novels about it."

"You are axes, in a world of wood. And the wood remembers when it has been cut, even if the axe forgets."

"I consider myself a pretty rounded guy. I've done pretty elite things in business, sport and academics and all of a sudden I woke up one morning and I'm a 'big, black, British, gay guy'. That was frustrating at times"

"The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it."

"Hell has a climate, but no situation. It lies in the spirit, and not in space."

"The Rich Man's Banquet, which was to last for a decade, had now begun: the feast, it was recognised, went to the greediest."

"They loved him, I think, because, with all his merits, he showed them to be rich: looking at his portraits, they understood at last how rich they really were."

"Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out."

"How simple-minded of the Germans to imagine that we British could be cowed by the destruction of our ancient monuments! As though any havoc of the German bombs could possibly equal the things we have done ourselves!"

"Educ[ated]: during the holidays from Eton."

"For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood, That scarlet tree within, which has the power To make dull words bud forth and burst in flower."

"Heroic figures are now obsolete, So Demigod and Devil find retreat In minds of children — as rare beasts and men, Elsewhere extinct, persist in hill or fen From man protected — where each form assumes Gigantic stature and intention, looms From wind-moved, twilight-woven histories: For them each flower teems with mysteries."

"The British bourgeoisie Is not born And does not die, But, if it is ill, It has a frightened look in its eyes."

"Our General Had to restore "Law-and-Order" At Amritsar; For he knew That if he failed To shoot Two thousand natives They would have laughed at him. To laugh at a General, Is, of course, very rude."

"The Daily Herald is unkind. It has been horrid About my nice new war. I shall burn the Daily Herald."

"The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy…to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted."

"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."

"For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time."

"They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts — and rather portly withal."

"Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax."

"I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' Hose, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?"

"I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it sometime. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes."

"And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into."

"But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it."

"I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing... Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.""

"What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?"

"And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody."

"These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and ... and it was too late."

"Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before."

"Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of."