Sorry, but I don't engage with anyone I don't know who contacts me out of the blue. Random private messages from unknown persons will be ignored.

Nulla dies sine linea.

"If I can try to be kind to people who disagree with me, I feel like that's the mission." - Tim Minchin, Ways To Change The World (Channel 4 News podcast on YouTuber)

Previously:

"(Anxiety) is the flip side of creativity." - Jimmy Carr (yes, I know, who'd have thought?)

"The starting point for our enquiries into the past is the present." - David Mitchell, Unruly

"Just do the day in front of you that is enough - you are enough - it's ok." - First Dog On The Moon, The Guardian, 7th October 2022

"It's not perfect, which is fine." - Brett Yang, TwoSet Violin

"Women must still march, are always marching, everything and nothing changes." - First Dog On The Moon, The Guardian, 15th March 2021

"I'm only ever funny by mistake." - Susie Dent, 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown

"Wanting to be good at stuff is the worst and a dead end. If you have no desire to be good or indeed an actual will to be bad, you will, ironically, be a huge success." - Rhys James, Twitter

"Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop." - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"I can do some things...it's just I can't do any of them very well." - Bob Mortimer, Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

"We've never done anything that's relevant." - Vic Reeves

"I see words as things. I don't care what they're made of." - David Mitchell, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown

"It's not playing out well in the playground of my imagination." - John Cooper Clarke, WILTY

"I'm reading a book at the moment. It's called The Anticlimax. The first part is good." - Milton Jones, Mock The Week

"Most of us, regardless of ethnicity, will probably be in the same boat when it comes to the end of the world." - Tyson Yunkaporta, The Guardian, 27th September 2017

"But doesn't the end of the world look beautiful?" - Graham Norton, interview in The Guardian, 3rd December 2017

"To cut a long story short - The End." - Milton Jones, Mock The Week

"You know how it ends when you run out of ink." - Henning Wehn on writing, Have I Got News For You

"Comedy is surprising people with the truth." - Tim Ferguson, Home Delivery

"With any luck, heaven will be much like here, now, on a good day." - Peter Goldsworthy, In Paradisum

"Si c’est ici le meilleur des mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres?" - Voltaire, Candide.

"When you are trying to write, a lot of staring out of the window goes on." - Alan Bennett

"Perfection murders joy." - Elizabeth Gilbert, interview in The Guardian, 27th September 2015.

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." - Leonard Bernstein

"Getting your hackneyed cliches right is not rocket surgery." Peter FitzSimons, SMH

"I may as well tell you that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet." - P. G. Wodehouse

"May your words never fail you." - Andrew Denton, Randling

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings." - Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing

"It's a disturbing moment when you realise that it doesn't matter what you write and how clearly you write it, people will take it a thousand different ways." - Martin McKenzie-Murray, Sydney Morning Herald, 17th May, 2012

"What's the point of rhetorical questions?" - Clive Anderson, QI

"We need to be confronted. We need to be reminded that nothing is neat, that people do not uniformly share any point of view. We need to remember that disagreement is not the end of the world, merely the start of a healthy discussion." - Mark Pesce, Unleashed, 12th May, 2010

"Fiction is fiction and writes its own histories." - John Sutherland, Curiosities of Literature

"We tried going back to being factual, but soon we ran out of facts." - Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear

"History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself." - Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 And All That.