- In the 100 years when we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we've managed to take the fifteen years of children's lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bureaucracy and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it.
- [on Peter Capaldi in Deep Breath (2014)] Not unlike Richard Dawkins, madly science-fictive and theophobic, with selective amnesia and vague formless feelings of charity.
- When on occasion I'm asked by groups of aspiring writers what they should do to get on, my advice is always, emphatically, smoke. Smoke often and smoke with gusto. It's a little known, indeed little researched, fact of literature and journalism that no non-smoker is worth reading. And writers who give up become crashing bores.
- After giving up drink and drugs, I continued to smoke about 60 a day until 12 years ago and then I stopped. And people said, "Well done! How did you manage it? What willpower!" It didn't feel like well done. It felt like a defeat - the capitulation to fear. When I started smoking at 14 I was golden, immortal. I smoked around the world; I took pride in my ability to smoke with elegance, panache and skill. Smoking was my talent and I gave it up because I lost my nerve. I don't miss the cigarettes, but I do miss the me that smoked so beautifully.
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