“I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.”

What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.

I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.

Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.

Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.

I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.

Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

I couldn’t stand here, hanging on, when the very thing i held disappeared more with each passing day.

My mother told me once that we can’t survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn’t want to.

Divided we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was “To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present.

I could get you to smile like that, and without sales tax.

I once tried standing up on my toes to see far out in the distance, but I found that I could see much farther by climbing to a high place.

Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.