“Mr Pin lit a cigar. Smoking was his one vice. at least, it was his only vice that he thought of as a vice. The others were just job skills.”

“If a man has no vices, he's in great danger of making vices out of his virtues, and there's a spectacle. We've all seen them: men who were monsters of philanthropy and women who were dragons of purity. ... No, no - nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modesly around it.”

“A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.”

“The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.”

“Mum once told Dad that vices are only vices when looked at through the frame of society.”

“Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”