Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a...

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling...

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn’t. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and...

…Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It’s that kind of fight. … And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

It’s the strangest thing about this church – it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude....

Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian’s lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man’s truths – if other men had truths – and he believed...

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful...

You are who you are when nobody’s watching.

Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles – I recall the...