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

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.

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.

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'.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

There's such a thin line between winning and losing.

From form to formless and from finite to infinite

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

Losing and dying: it's the same thing.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

I've always worked at the piano; I like to hear what I'm doing, I like the sound, to hear the actual sound. I get bored just looking at a manuscript.

Imagine if you could go watch Mozart today, even if it's the last, crappiest show he ever played. What a thrill that would be.

Anton brings the camera. I'll bring a tuba, wear black, not shave, and take us to a burned-down Chinese restaurant. (On being photographed by his longtime photo collaborator Anton Corbijn)

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.