The architect, Peter Arens who is the monstrous carbuncle architect, not merely did his design which had won a public competition never get built but his practice suffered financially for some years.

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we're chatting away, nice to see you.

I mean Buckingham Palace has never hired a professional public relations outfit let alone a Madison Avenue type and they would throw up their hands in horror at the very idea.

The winner is not the player who wins the most pots. The winner is the player who wins the most money.

Thatcher came under pressure from right wing backbenchers to shut up the Prince of Wales and there was a deal done between them where he did actually shut up in the end.

The good news is that in every deck of fifty-two cards there are 2,598,960 possible hands. The bad news is that you are only going to be dealt one of them.

When the magistrate says 'That's not a good enough reason my man.' He said 'Excuse me, could I ask you? Have you taken an oath of allegiance to the Monarch?'

I think her friends were worried that the bulimia might come back, about some psychological slide, and she was given breathing space to some extent by the media as much as she ever has been.

What it was at the time was literally a plea for, to get the pressure off for a while, to give her space to breathe. She was very unhappy. She was feeling pretty claustrophobic.

If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.

I am made of a thousand ghosts, only you can shoot me down.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine.

I should be pleased, I suppose, that Hitler has carried out a revolution on our lines. But they are Germans. So they will end by ruining our idea.

Tragedy can break the heart but not the dam of the tearducts while schmaltz can dissolve the most hardened sophisticate.

He's in the mold of a Tom Watson, in that he'll hit the ball in the trees and undaunted go it there, flail it out and make something out of it.

I certainly didn't emerge from prison regretting anything I ever wrote, nor did I feel remorse for my crime in the least.

Whatever the medium, if you have great taste and not very much skill, you can still make something great.

Distance is always helpful, and the fact that I'm a U.S. politics junkie helps a lot.