Everyone said to me growing up, "You're like an American. You have to go to America. That's your spiritual home."

People in London think of London as the center of the world, whereas New Yorkers think the world ends three miles outside of Manhattan.

I miss being fawned over by restaurateurs and chefs.

I expect that in 40 years' time I'll be writing political tomes and working for an organisation like Oxfam.

I tried being a mechanic and I tried catering, but I realized I had even less aptitude for semi-skilled labour than for academic work.

My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung.

I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

I don't envy young Brits crossing the Atlantic to make their fortunes today.

Top Chef is a very smooth-running machine. All the people working there are incredibly professional and absolutely at the top of their game.

I wouldn't describe myself as a master of anything.

There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.

You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

Life is meant for the living but fit for the dead.

They mean hot like 'I'm too good for you I got my own money don't be frontin' me.' You're more like 'Be my boyfriend I'll make you cookies come meet my dad ' know what I mean

I've done every diet there is.

You can never love me.

Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.

Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

Fire isn’t good or bad. It just burns.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

Light and subject is inseparable. But when it is well integrated, it becomes the work of a fine masterpiece.