“It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.”

Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.

God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!

There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.

Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.

The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.

Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin

The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.

You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.

They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.

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.

Certainly if someone looks at my life, they will see that I have surrendered my heart, my life to Jesus Christ.

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

I just try and learn to be a good husband and be a good father before I am a good rock star. That means saying no to certain things that go with the business.

Unless you have a sense of values that’s shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values.

I believe. France and Germany and Japan, China, other nations, they’re going to exist. But they’re losing their significance and ability to deal with certain matters.

Sound is inspiring and I can be quite obssessive with certain sounds.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story’s going to end and how it’s going to go. But on television nobody knows what’s going to happen, even the writers.

Even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did