Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right.

I won’t have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I’m going: It’s like a row of restaurants in California.

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn’t really mean that I’m finished reading.

If we want a book to do more than what it does, that’s a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that’s an endorsement.

Dinner was meat – not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain – which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

To die guessing that you will be forgotten is one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?

I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don’t believe the free market has a mind.

I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn’t go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn’t much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

Writers quite often starve. And I’m mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that’s a formula for starvation.