You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.Collection: Jealousy
Cleanliness is the scourge of art.Collection: Art
My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.Collection: Art
Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.
Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.
Men know something that women don't know. Never ask directions of a stranger.
Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.
There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.
Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.
I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too.
As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.
Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.
Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.
Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.
Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.
As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.
Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.
The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.
All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.
It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure.
Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.
One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.
It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.
My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.
There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.
Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued.
Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster.
For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.
When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why.
The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.
Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.
In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.
One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.
More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how.
Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.
The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.
A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice.
The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.
When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.
How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'
Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws.
Personally, I belong to the speedy school of golf. If it were left up to me, I would introduce a new rule that said every golf ball has to stay in motion from the moment it leaves the tee to the moment it plops into the hole, thus obliging each player to run along after his ball and give it another whack before it stops rolling.
It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.