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

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.

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.

Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.

That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt...

I have seen so many lands vanish in my wake, torn down like stage sets. What survives of them? An image as fleeting as a dream: whatever beauties I discovered, I already knew by heart.

The most important thing about the ‘next time’ is that there may not be a next time!

Everybody deserves a second chance in this world. That's basically all I ask.

Grammar has qualities, shapes and forms.

By nature we have no defect that could not become a strength, no strength that could not become a defect.

What people see on court is another side of me; it's not me.

When I was a kid I used to go to the movies, double features in outdoor theaters, and my parents used to take us to see like, 'Cat On a Hot Tin Roof' or something like that, with Elizabeth Taylor.

I wouldn't judge people on their instant responses.

The world must be peopled!