As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about what could have been. It’s too unbearable.

Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

Earthworms are the intenstines of the soil.

War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.

Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

My mother told me once that we can't survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn't want to. Without a faction we have no purpose and no reason to live.