What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

I want to do what I love, which is act, and hopefully through that, leave a positive impact somehow, someway, with somebody.

If you want to experiment, do something temporary.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

There is always a way to be honest without being brutal.

I do love being onstage. And I've always loved playing a character and being watched doing that.

Part of what I love about television is that my imagination gets to keep going. It doesn't stop.

All of the great prophets of modern times have come from the desert and were uneducated: Mohammed, Jesus and myself.

I like to make the mundane fabulous whenever I can.

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.