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" Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private. "

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" I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too. "

" There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing. "

" Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard. "

" When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why. "

" Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite. "

" Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued. "

" Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster. "

" As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish. "

" Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one. "

" The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another. "

" Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish. "

" Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences. "

" In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life. "

" Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words. "

" Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it. "

" The first thing I hear when I wake up is the sea, which is so close to our house that its reflections from the sun dapple our bedroom ceiling. "

" There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time. "

Procrastination

" My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never. "

" When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read. "

" The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival. "

" Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable. "

" In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers. "

" Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away. "

" It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure. "

" Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it. "

" When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air. "

" Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor. "

" The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house. "

" The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible. "

" Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth. "