"There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional."
"Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last."
"Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British."
"The terrorist isn't a problem because he doesn't conform; he's a problem because he does. It's what he conforms to that makes him dangerous."
"For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly."
"We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world."
"The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal."
"Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre."
"You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last."
"Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see."
"Politically it's easy to salve one's conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again."
"What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities."
"Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story."
"The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto."
"As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right."
"Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial."
"The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here."
"There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest."
"Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia."
"It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears."
"To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company."
"Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same."
"Let's be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn't even concur with that exception."
"It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't."
"The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home."
