“The waiter came over to ask if all is delicious. As we have not yet ordered, it is certainly the perfect time to enquire.”

“To be compromised you need to have a stake in things, you need to have something to lose and something to gain. You have to be risking yourself, not all the time, but enough of the time to be weighing things up, principle over self-preservation, the gains, the losses.”

“Life in a police state magnifies the small mercies that it leaves alone until they become disproportionate to their significance; at the same time it banalises the worst travesties into mere routine.”

“Leo had once joked about writing an allegorical sketch where Parody packed its bags, shut up shop and put a sign on the door which read: “Closed. Any inquiries please contact the Real”.”

“In diplomacy there are two kinds of problems: small ones and large ones. The small ones will go away by themselves and the large ones you will not be able to do anything about. The biggest challenges in your career will come from the temptation to act. The test of your mettle will be how nobly you surmount it.”

“We like to think of creativity as a space for untrammelled imagination, free from all constraints. Yetwhile freedom, rule-breaking and inspiration are undoubtedly essential to the creative process, thepopular image of creativity overlooks another aspect: examine the life of any great artist and youwill find evidence of hard work, discipline and a hard-won knowledge of the rules and conventionsof their medium.”

“You might get up at noon and work at home in your dressing gown, in a pigsty of a living room. You might check into a different hotel room every day and work on the bed. Your creative process and working habits might look like total chaos to an outsider, but if they work for you, that’s all that matters. And there will be some method in the madness – patterns in your daily activities that are vital to your creativity. These are the things you need to do to keep your imagination alive – whether it’s sitting at a desk by 6am, using the same pen, notebook or make of computer, hitch-hiking across America, putting rotten apples in your desk so that the scent wafts into your nostrils as you work, or sitting in your favourite café with a glass of absinthe.”