“I don’t watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.”

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.

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an email, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you.

It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

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.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don’t offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

Generally, we admire the thing we are not.

I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

But if one could go back in time, I’d love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who’s one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in ‘Rio Bravo’.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I’m getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I’m just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind – with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

Belonging to oneself–the whole essence of life lies in that.

As long as there is one heart on Earth where I still live, my memory will not die.

There is so many things wrong horribly wrong in this world but I know with certainty that you are not one of them.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

Write for pleasure and publish for money.