"All my life, all I wanted to be was a professional poet. To me being a professional poet was better than notching up a hat trick at Old Trafford.....You get to wear fine clothes and perfume and nobody pulls you up on it. You get out of bed late in the day and nobody calls you a lazy bastard. A state of reverie and the virtue of idleness are paramount. Any poet will tell you this."

“A suit where I can fall down drunk in a ditch get up the next morning and go on to a wedding; or more likely a funeral at my time of life. I could go to six a week but no man can live on vol-au-vents alone.”

“was in and out with a caution; I had a residential thing going on for Her Majesty's pleasure. So I missed a golden opportunity there while the man in black was still alive, I could have gone up to him and said, 'Eh Johnny, get over it! Some of us have done some serious bird'.”

“...she took us out on a motor ride to a beach, it was a nudist camp.....What those people do on their time off is their own business, the dirty bastards.”

“As is often the case a failed marriage led to a successful divorce.  We split the house; I got the outside...... It was at that point where I made a promise to myself, I said I'm not going to get married again, I'm just gonna find a woman I don't like and give her everything.”

“My paternal grandfather, George, had been a regular soldier in India until chucking-out time in 1948, and funnily enough bore an uncanny resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi .”

“I'm a short-term nostalgic; things were great ten minutes ago. If only I could go back there. At my time of life I suffer from déjà vu and amnesia at the same time; I can't remember what happens next.”