Hardly anybody read my novel. There is an annual meeting of its readers, but it looks like those pictures of polar bears on an ice floe

I am jealous of her mobility, but determined to profit from being left alone with my books

Is it because Australians eat so much meat?

Proper writers should take responsibility for the pictures their words suggest

The same people who conspired to buy it are now competing to get first push

All the special effects are bigger now, but you can’t bring on another Han Solo just by pressing a button

As the sketch dragged on, the silence of the audience escalated to the monumental

The best artists are a bit like children and the best critics are a bit like artists

He has guessed the unsettling effect of going nuts in your face, like Peter Capaldi in The Thick Of It

I’m chortling to have got my book done before I roll over and gasp my last

I am likely to proclaim that Margaret Thatcher once looked at me in silent awe

Mine were the intelligence reports on Britain that every Australian prime minister read first

I long for the days when Jack Nicholson could deliver a speech without flashing his ivory like a leopard set to charge

The extras do uncanny impersonations of corpses, and sometimes can’t keep it up

To collect an actor’s performances is still one of the best reasons for continuing the long search into infinity

Performers do best to do their best every time. It is easier to maintain this attitude if you are not being treated as a deity

After the first episode, I was wiping the blood from my ears with Kleenex

When they sang, they were magic, but when they talk now, they are nerve gas

It was a miracle on the scale of Lucy Worsley not dressing up as Queen Elizabeth I

More and more I need to be told things are happening. Only then can I turn my majestic attention to them, like a rusty old weather vane miles behind the action