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" 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. "

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" When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks. "

" Cleanliness is the scourge of art. "

" 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. "

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

" It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other. "

" You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety. "

" Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average. "

" Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence. "

" For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news. "

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

" The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how. "

" 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. "

" Personally, I belong to the speedy school of golf. If it were left up to me, I would introduce a new rule that said every golf ball has to stay in motion from the moment it leaves the tee to the moment it plops into the hole, thus obliging each player to run along after his ball and give it another whack before it stops rolling. "

" What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now. "

" Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time. "

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