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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Craig Brown

Words

Life

Own

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Craig Brown

Sleep

Way

" 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. "

" Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then. "

Craig Brown

Comedy

Time

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

" People think of waves as going in an orderly crash - whoosh - crash - whoosh, but in fact there are lots of different crashes and whooshes, all at different stages, and all going off at the same time. "

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

" 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. "

" Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp. "

Craig Brown

Way

Touch

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences. "

" 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. "

Craig Brown

Why

Stay

" By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher. "

" Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Craig Brown

Losing

Process

" 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. "

" A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice. "

" 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. "

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