“I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you’re never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It’s in the spirit of it.”

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

I don’t believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.

I think the fact that I’m so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman – I’ll kiss a frog if you like.

When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

My parents were marvelously educated people.

I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you’ll find it.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it’ll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

Without the accurate spine movement, one can’t exist dynamically.

Expect only 5% of an intelligence report to be accurate.The trick of a good commander is to isolate the 5%.

Let me be accurate in everything, for though you and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad. That the many horrors and the so long strain on nerves has at the last turn my brain.

That’s all accurate and of some importance, but of far more importance is the fact that elections just don’t take place, not in any meaningful sense of the term ‘election.’

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

But to say that people who have same-sex attractions are the only group of people who need to go to a therapist to completely resolve those attractions isn’t something I find biblically accurate.

But I found that being an artist and doing accurate work is very difficult.