I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about because this was the new world that was emerging.

Advertising is a business of words but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly seeing things over and over better than I've ever seen them before.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Housing Works is the coolest thrift store in the world because not only are they the best thrift store - they're not the most thrifty thrift store - but they have amazing stuff and all of their proceeds go directly to kids mostly homeless kids living with AIDS and HIV in New York in the metropolitan area.