I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there's a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that.

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.

The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.

She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?

Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.