Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin wi… - Mark Forsyth

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. It can be the exact depth in the sea to which a chap’s corpse has been sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, ‘Full fathom five your father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet that ever lived. Express precisely the same thought in any other way – e.g. ‘your father’s corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level’ – and you’re just a coastguard with some bad news.

fiction is only fact minus time.

There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts.