There was a moment in the early '80s when I wanted to work on films and wanted to live in L.A.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.

I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read.

It's great to get out of the study and work with real living and breathing people.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

I'm ashamed to say the first play I saw at the Royal Court was mine.