I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow

I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did.

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

Love and hate are cruel, only liking is kind

They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering Wes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.

Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

It was kind of unexpected, to wake up one day and realize that the things that you've worked so hard to accomplish, you've accomplished in so little an amount of time.

I used to get my money at the end of the week, buy my mum something, or buy a record, and that was it.

Intercession is more than specific: it is pondered: it requires us to bear on our heart the burden of those for whom we pray.

The destructive power of a lie is stronger than the truth.

If from society we learn to live, solitude should teach us how to die.

To speak with the shadow, you must know the language of the darkness!

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

I also work with the regular orchestras in Munich, Germany and other similar orchestras.