I’ve got wide tastes, but I don’t like jazz.
If it wasn’t for the fun and money, I really don’t know why I’d bother.
Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‘Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?’
When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.
When you’re all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God’s waiting room.
The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ Who could say that this is bad?
No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I’ve been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.
An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.
I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It’s a speech-to-text program, and there’s an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.
I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.
I must have read every issue of ‘Punch’ published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like ‘Three Men in a Boat.’
I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don’t know how to do it, and wouldn’t be any good at it if I did, so I’m going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.