As Clive Anderson remarked to Jeffrey Archer,

Is there no beginning to your talents?

Linda Smith had a good line about Archer too. When someone said they’d like to deprive him of the oxygen of publicity, she observed tartly, “I’d like to deprive him of the oxygen of oxygen.”

And there must be an earlier source for this one, but I heard it from Jack Dee on I’m sorry I haven’t a clue:

Once heard, forgotten.

A review of one of my gigs, surely. For the niche genre of conductors’ inadvertent self-putdowns, see here—and then my elegant trio of variations punctuating my Visual culture post.