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" A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then. "

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" To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on. "

" It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves. "

" I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer. "

" I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign. "

" It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life. "

" Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models. "

" I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me. "

" Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever. "

" Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions. "

" I can't remember who it was who advocated that you should march with the left and dine with the right but I've often concurred, taking the view that I personify the great tolerance of Britain by consenting to being regally entertained. Besides, there is a degree of truth in the view that while the left are worthier, the right are wittier. "

" You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me. "

" That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian. "

" Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it. "

" Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment. "

" Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books. "

" In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year. "

" I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale. "

" Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he. "

" The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra! "

" I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground. "

" Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak. "

" It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it. "

" Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent. "

" Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world? "

" Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future. "

" In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for. "

" If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry - and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sports funding. "

" A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating. "

" In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays. "

" I've said it before - and I'll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary; through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us. "