Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

If a liar tells you he is lying, is he telling the truth.

Sports can unite worlds, tear down walls and transcend race, the past, and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.

When a New Zealand journo, with a nose resembling the beak of his national bird, asked me why Lankans have long names, I told him I would rather have a long name than a long nose. He replied he'd rather have a long you-know-what. Such is the insightful cricketing analysis that goes on in the press box.

I know now that doors open as quickly as they close. That nothing very good or very bad lasts for very long.

Throughout my life, even when times were tough, I never stopped buying books. Or, come to think of it, booze. My library is dusty and well stocked. My liver is well worn.

I have no idea what the song is about, but at least it does not sound like furniture falling down stairs

Thank god there is no god. Because to believe in him would be to acknowledge he doesn't like me much.

Many people have promised the world over bottles and delivered little more than nothing. I am one of them, and they are one of you.

How much love does one need in a lifetime? Is there a quantity of brain space that is allocated to love? And for those of us who have loved less, does this space become occupied by something else? Like cricket, or religion, perhaps.

There is little point to anything. In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter.

The Duckworth-Lewis method of resolving rain-affected games has divided the cricketing fraternity into those who do not understand it and those who pretend they do. Rumour has it that it involves calculus, astrology, quantum mechanics and the use of dice. Either way teams get screwed.

While it is possible to be competent with both hands in a given activity, ambidexterity works on the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-jack principle.