"He takes coke and has slept with a prostitute - but he's a TV presenter for God's sake!"

"I think it was Horry Walpole who remarked, “In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dan…"

"I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That i…"

"The beauty of the brain is that you can still be as greedy as you like for knowledge and it doesn’t show."

"I don't need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me."

"I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that--don't you?--…"

"I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday . . . mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so d…"

"I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the s…"

"It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue."

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."