“Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.”

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.

I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say ‘Can I make up?’ and he would say ‘Oh yes – tinted?’, or he would say, ‘Oh yes – clotted?’

People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,

The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.

And were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man’s soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.

You can’t reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

When I was on the Ryder Cup team and I surrounded myself with the other 11 guys and our captains, being in that locker room, it gave me an extra sense of confidence.

Having a family, taking care of your kids and people outside yourself, maybe it’s motivated me more to give that extra something.

It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.

They used to call me ‘Touchdown T.’ I remember in high school, we had homecoming, and I got in front of the pep rally, and I told them, ‘I’m going to run for three touchdowns.’ I ran for three touchdowns, kicked the extra point, and took myself out the game.

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.

Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.