The audience will always feel far more generous if, as some point in the evening, a little time has been found for them to applaud themselves. - Don Paterson

Yes, I know Marcus Aurelius or Vauvenargues or Chesterton has already said this, and far better; but let’s face it—you weren’t listening then either.

In the end, the desolate age always turns instinctively to Classicism, which if nothing else legislates against certain kinds of disappointment.

I’m always amused by those commentators who nervously insist that the working class’s constant use of the word fuck is really just “a form of punctuation.” It is, however, no more or less then what they dread: an inexhaustible river of smelted wrath, a Phlegethon of ancestral grievance.