“Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.”

Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.

I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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.

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.

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.