If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I did a lot of acting at school and university, then I went to drama school. It was quite a normal route.

I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.

There's no way we can possibly understand anything. But we can see things, we can perceive things, and we can wonder. We can just be in a world of awe and wonder. That's the best we can do.

Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through.

Brewers enjoy working to make beer as much as drinking beer instead of working.

I'd say that the No. 1 attribute you need as an actor is to be malleable. You need to be able to change and tailor what you're doing to what the situation dictates.

We can have faith in the future only if we have faith in ourselves.

Do we have to talk in order to agree or agree in order to talk?

Tolerance and understanding won't 'trickle down' in our society any more than wealth does.