Originality must compound with inheritance.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Just love as you breathe.

I think it was 37 years that I did music.

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are

That's just how I see things. I think things that are the most dramatic or tragic can also look the most ridiculous and funny. That's part of being human.

And I was really saying that no matter how bad things are there is always a calm after a storm, so don't give up on things.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

I get really excited imagining what we can do in the future with broadband.

I'm like a superhero. Call me Basketball Man.

We all harbour a great sadness in our soul