I never saw Portsmouth by day.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

I can't distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.

Before I came out, I had a lot of anger. For years people would ask, 'How are you doing?' and I'd say, 'Good, fine.' It's show business, and that's what you have to show.

It was the success of 'Bend it Like Beckham' which got my name out there. 'A Mighty Heart' also helped.

New York has always embraced me.

I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it.

The only way to improve a trick is to find a simpler and more direct way of doing it.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

It takes 42 muscles to smile. Instead pick up your middle finger and say "bite me!