Children themselves know they are being cheated. Ultimately we owe it to our children. They are in school for 190 days a year. Every moment they spend learning is precious. If a year goes by and they are not being stretched and excited that blights their life.

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat sleep read watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

As to those who hoard gold and silver and spend it not in God's path give them then the tidings of a painful agony: on a day when these things shall be heated in hell-fire and their foreheads and their sides and their backs shall be branded therewith.

Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).