It's not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don't forget things like that.

One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him.

Oh, to me not drinking is like being dead, almost. I sit here taking endless journeys down memory lane. It gets boring.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.

The more necessary it becomes to stop drinking, the more impossible it becomes to stop.

What a pity people don't take as much trouble with their own breeding as intelligent racehorse owners do. But then I suppose it is bordering on fascism to think like that.

My misdeeds are accidental happenings and merely the result of having been in the wrong bar or bed at the wrong time, say most days between midday and midnight.

I was under the care of a couple of medical students who couldn't diagnose a decapitation.

In most betting shops you will see three windows marked 'Bet Here', but only one window with the legend 'Pay Out'.

There's nothing undignified about lying about all day and being waited on by servants, sipping bloody champagne.

Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.

Mentally it is possible to break records, once you understand that, you can do anything.

I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory...

Gratitude causes us to no longer desire a different life. Instead, it causes us to make the most of the one life we already have.

The way you experience [pain] can change so much depending on your attitude.

I have no doubt that given a real choice, the vast majority of Muslims and Arabs, like everyone else will choose a free society over a fear society.

Took an oath, I'ma stick it out to the end.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.

The acceptance of all that God has given us and the willingness to let it go - to give it back to him at a moment's notice - that's true human freedom.

There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.