“It is a curiously moving experience, to hear 350 sailors uttering the words "Oh shit!" in eleven different languages.”

“I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.”

“In fact the bare adjective "bad" hardly scratches the surface of the man's awesome incapacity.”

“Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it...To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience.”

“Prodigy" Huge, megalithic corporation seeks a talented, ambitious prodigy to join our exciting dynamic Prodigy Division for summer job. Requirements include at least fourteen years' experience as a certified child prodigy ability to anagram adeptly (and alliterate agilely), fluency in eleven languages. Job duties include reading, remembering encyclopedias, novels, and poetry; and memorizing the first ninety-nine digits of pi.33”

“One thing you'll learn when you're in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there's really no bottom to where they'll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it - a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place - the more they'll eat it up with a big fucking spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It's too good.”

“...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...”