Oh, the self-importance of fading stars. Never mind, they will be black holes one day.

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'.

... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.

I also like to follow nature's rhythm. In times or places, they have their own rhythm. So you cannot push it. So we must accept that as well. Wherever we're born at this time, we just live it.

Know your limits, not so that you can honor them, but so that you can smash them to pieces and reach for magnificence.

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted.

Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it.

Fascism: awful stench of saw and axe.

Every invention eventually becomes obsolete.

When I was small, I would refuse to drink when I ate fish because I thought the fish would reconstitute itself in my stomach

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.