“The world of sexual abuse is quintessentiall y secret. It is the perfect crime.”

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children’s speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

In the context of the great debates about identity politics – are you gay or straight, nationalist or republican, British or English and so on.

I would ask, “Do you ride a bike?” I love everything about the machine – the sensation of the tyres on the road, the mobility – and I love the fact that you have this intimate relationship with the elements, and the landscape.

Be prepared to be enlightened, enraged, amused, engaged, and above all provoked.

Children’s bodies aren’t like automobiles with the assailant’s fingerprints lingering on the wheel.

It’s the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too many drinks.

Erotic love, traditionally, has been described as shared sexual attraction.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.

Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.

Whether or not someone sexualizes you for wearing an outfit, that’s their problem and not yours.

My sexual nature is irrelevant. I’m an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.

If Love is too much to ask, at least Respect everyone, regardless of race, creed, sexual preference, bloodline, criminal history, power, or position.