One should never learn from one's mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure.

Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.

The newsprint thesp celebrity interview as a middle-brow art form suffers from desperate overproduction. There'll be at least 10 in the broadsheets today and every Sunday hereafter.

Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.

Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn't aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.

There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.

If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.

All I'm saying is that Louis Vuitton and L'Oreal didn't invent branding at some point in the mid-Eighties. Big, reassuring names have been around a long time.

Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.

Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts.

It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.

Some memories were harder to forget than others. Especially the painful ones.

Sometimes I feel like God…when I order someone killed – they die the same day.

Only when you see the flower for what it is, you can see it's true beauty

I live in a wonderful world of make-believe. A world of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. A world of Winnie the Pooh and Edward Bear. Things like that. Wonderful things. Funny things.

50 years from now we won't need as much human labour to do what manual workers do, so we should be able to take that extra productivity and put it to better use.

The world is full of people who are waiting for someone to come along and motivate them to be the kind of people they wish they could be. The problem is that no one is coming to the rescue.

O sweet spontaneous earth how often has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty thou answereth them only with spring.

The precipitancy of disputation, and the stir and noise of passions that usually attend it, must needs be prejudicial to verity.

Strangers are just friends I haven't met yet.