But you've got to have money for comfort, which obviously doesn't matter as much when you're young, but even so. I always like to bloody eat well and be warm. Have a drink when I want it.

One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him.

Oh, to me not drinking is like being dead, almost. I sit here taking endless journeys down memory lane. It gets boring.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.

The more necessary it becomes to stop drinking, the more impossible it becomes to stop.

What a pity people don't take as much trouble with their own breeding as intelligent racehorse owners do. But then I suppose it is bordering on fascism to think like that.

My misdeeds are accidental happenings and merely the result of having been in the wrong bar or bed at the wrong time, say most days between midday and midnight.

It's not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don't forget things like that.

I was under the care of a couple of medical students who couldn't diagnose a decapitation.

In most betting shops you will see three windows marked 'Bet Here', but only one window with the legend 'Pay Out'.

Knowledge is power, power corrupts. Study hard, be evil.

You do not truly know yourself until you have learned to appreciate others.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

Uninvited criticism is insult.

I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

Begin with loss and see how the world contradicts you, how the horizon implies that beyond it the water is not empty but full of ships all docking at another island.

One thing I learned from his holiness the Dali Lama is the importance of humor.

You have to get something down, and then find ways of working in complexity and different layers of meaning... My first drafts are usually the ravings of a delusional fantasist.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

Normally that's the kind of thing, even Colin Kaepernick should applaud that, but people don't. And that's quite telling right there, but [Donald] Trump wants to reinstitute that.