“Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nic...” — Lynne Truss Quote

Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type; and then we live with the painful consequences.

Don't pessimism and caution naturally go hand in hand?

My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, 'University Challenge,' so you can see what kind of sad person I am.

After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.

I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.

In this sport luck and tragedy are only a few hundredths of seconds apart from each other.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

When you set yourself up to be apart from rest of mankind, you're in danger of crashing further than they ever could. That's the trouble with royalty, after all.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

I'm an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.