To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.Honoré de Balzac
Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam
There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.Howard Jacobson
I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area.Howard Jacobson
Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.Salman Rushdie
If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.Douglas Coupland
The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.Douglas Coupland
Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.Douglas Coupland
