Quotes

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.