If there's one thing I know, it's this - everybody thinks somebody else is having a better life.

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth.

If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.

My mother, father, stepmother and surrogate mother have all died of cancer; my best friend has got terminal cancer and at least five of my other friends have had cancer but survived it.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?

Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

The grandeur of God, the glory of His majesty.

At the end of medicine is dope

Do you know the one about how politics is show business for the ugly? State politics is show business for ugly people who can't remember their lines.

I don't even like clowns. Clowns are not normal people.

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.

I'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.

I think we ought to have a kindness year, or a kindness century.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.