• Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

• I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.

• Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

• Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

• People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

• The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

• Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperatelly I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

• The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

• Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories - those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

• People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.