- [in explanation for late work]: Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power.
- I'm a Jiffy disposal unit when it comes to leftovers. Apple cores: count me in. Fish heads: I'm your man, especially the eyes, yum yum.
- My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.
- [while trapped on a zip-line while celebrating an Olympic gold medal] Get me a rope. Get me a ladder. I think the brakes got stuck.
- My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.
- To rinse the gutters of public life, you need a gutter press.
- [on his potential Tory rivals in Parliament] After 2016 who knows what will happen. But I'm very, very happy with the job of mayor of London. They should cool their porridge, save their breath, put their shoulders to the wheel, all hands to the mast, and all shoot from the same trench - to mix my metaphors.
- [on gay marriage] You can take your partner up the Arcelor... and marry him.
- In 1904, 20% of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can't turn the clock back to 1904, what's the point of being a Conservative?
- My friends: as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, there are only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
- I think I was once given cocaine, but I sneezed so it didn't go up. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.
- Or whatever.
- [on how he was feeling after being sacked as Shadow Arts Minister] Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.
- [on being overweight] Face it: it's all your own fat fault.
- [on trains, before becoming Mayor of London] A horse is a safer bet than the trains.
- [2014; dismissing calls for a ban on smoking in London's parks and squares and claiming there was a lack of clinical evidence in the NHS to justify a ban] There are many other proposals in this report that I think involve less bossiness, less nannying, less finger-wagging than telling people they can't smoke in a vast open space. I think smoking is a scourge and people should be discouraged from smoking, but actively to ban people from doing something that is legal in a big open space is taking bossiness too far.
- The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.
- One thing you have got to do politically is to identify the ties that bind society together and try to strengthen them.
- [on inequality] No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.
- [on using a mobile phone whilst driving] I don't believe that is necessarily any more dangerous than the many other risky things that people do with their free hands while driving - nose-picking, reading the paper, studying the A-Z, beating the children, and so on.
- I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.
- [on Margaret Thatcher] I realise that there may be some confusion in my prescriptions between what I would do, what Maggie would do, and what the government is about to do or is indeed already doing... I don't think it much matters, because the three are likely to turn out to be one and the same.
- Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.
- I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done.
- [on Nigel Farage] He's a rather engaging geezer.
- [on Tony Blair] It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.
- I can hardly condemn UKIP as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked Euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself.
- [on the City of Portsmouth] Too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs.
- Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase...
- [on winning the London mayoral race] Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything.
- I don't see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects.
- [2008] I wonder whether it's absolutely necessary for Whitehall to decide whether smoking should be banned in bars and clubs and restaurants. I'm not a smoker, I disapprove of it, but I think this is something that could pre-eminently be decided locally.
- If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn't ever get anywhere.
- We cannot turn our backs on Europe. We are part of Europe.
- [on employment] What I worry about is that people are losing confidence, losing energy, losing enthusiams, and there's a real opportunity to get them into work.
- It is easy to make promises - it is hard work to keep them.
- Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.
- No one obeys the speed limit except a motorised rickshaw.
- I'd like thousands of schools as good as the one I went to, Eton.
- What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work.
- I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.
- If you turn a blind eye to fare evasion, if you accustom people to getting away with minor crime, you are making it more likely that they will go on to commit more serious crimes. That is why we have so much disorder in London. It is a disgrace.
- [on being a journalist] It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.
- I have more in common with a three-toed sloth or a one-eyed pterodactyl or a Kalamata olive than I have with Winston Churchill.
- I take on an almost unbelievable amount of exercise, but I have a bad habit of eating the children's supper for breakfast.
- We should be helping all those who can to join the ranks of the super-rich, and we should stop any bashing or moaning or preaching or bitching and simply give thanks for the prodigious sums of money that they are contributing to the tax revenues of this country, and that enable us to look after our sick and our elderly and to build roads, railways and schools.
- There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.
- I'm backing David Cameron's campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest.
- [in conversation with Bob Crow about the London Underground strikes] I can't sit down and negotiate with you on air when you're holding a gun to Londoners' head and threatening disruption to the greatest city on earth.
- The job of mayor of London is unbelievably taxing, particularly in the run-up to the Olympics.
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