QUOTE UNQUOTE

I get quite lonely by myself and I start buying cats - Peter Stringfellow, nightclub owner

Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it's any different - Beryl Bainbridge, authoress

Ask those people who say 'Don't rock the boat' whether they would work for pounds 4.26 an hour - Rodney Bickerstaffe, Unison general secretary, over the controversial minimum wage figure agreed by the TUC

Being recognised as a celebrity has always made me feel uncomfortable. It was a media event to go out and buy a bloody newspaper - Martin Shaw, actor

If you stick your face on television, you can hardly blame people for wanting to come up and poke you to make sure it's you - Victoria Wood, comedienne

I'd had girl friends from the day when I first discovered what you could do in the back row of a cinema - Lord Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury, quoted in Humphrey Carpenter's biography

I know everybody in this industry fights shy in the face of maturity. But it doesn't kill you to accept that time has passed - Billy Bragg, pop singer and political activist

In Moscow we have very few humorous things - Andrei Blagonadezhdin, sculptor, who has produced a monument to a learner driver, a figure of a man with a head shaped like a teapot. Russian slang for a novice driver is 'chainik' or teapot