'All these things are very old – the sketch, and the boat, and the afternoon.'

 

 

Have you ever taken a bath in a cement mixer?

'To climb the glass mountain, one first requires a good reason'

"Two years on and I still find myself writing about that albatross. Two years on and I still find myself when I'm writing about that albatross."

"Don’t be too magnificent, all I have is a dinner suit"

"Wagner?"..."Wagner."..."I thought so, I recognise the sense of humour"

'I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it'

"Shake your business up and poor it. I haven’t got all day."

'...a fictional boat, moored safe and ruined both at once in its own eternal bay, is less doomed than we are. We’re as doomed as the Cutty Sark itself, tall, elegant, real, mundanely gathering the London sky around its masts and making it wondrous, extraordinary, for the people coming up out of the underground train station in the evening, the ship-of-history gracious against the sky for all the people who see it and all the people who don’t even notice it any more because they’re so used to seeing it, and just two months to go before there’ll be nothing left of it but a burnt-out hull, a scoop of scorched plank work.      

We are doomed on land and doomed at sea, you and me.'

 'In my city, I didn't make a sound when I fell over and cracked my crown, heard a woman say "stay down, champion, stay down." But I got up, got in a car, said "I don't think I'm gonna go very far," just take me one time around the ballroom slow, and take me home.'