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.

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.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

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

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.

A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather---a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.

When I was really young, I wanted to be a history teacher because I was obsessed with the past.

I don't host a show and go, 'Have you got my best angle?'

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

Donald Trump is not a very bright or nice man. Bad combination.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

Some readers and commentators really want to scrape your insides out to make sense of your work. Others say, there's the work, it speaks for itself. Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle.

We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'

The best propaganda omits rather than invents

Everyone in America likely has a bullying story, whether as the victim, bully or as a witness.