It's so important to keep a marriage alive with small treats and doing little things for each other. Just remembering to say nice things and to have listening time is vital. That ghastly phrase 'quality time' means taking three minutes to sit down and be still with someone rather than yelling over your shoulder as you rush out.

When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

I don't believe in the term 'guilty pleasure,' because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don't know, taking gratification in some stranger's ghastly death or something - which I guess I do enjoy, because I read a ton of true crime.

During the summer of 2000, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's 100th birthday, I asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he was hoping to reach 100. 'Good God, no,' he spluttered, 'I can't imagine anything worse. What a ghastly idea.'

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

Before I do anything I think well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that's really worthwhile.

I think marriage is ghastly.

If one's honest about it spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty how many ghastly mortifying missteps how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment how partial all accomplishment is how incomplete?