Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.

Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.

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.

In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate.