“You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.”

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.

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.

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.

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Standards are always out of date.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.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else.

My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

Everything else is relative levels of hell.

When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics,