I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day. The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it. It is in bad shape

If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?

One is never alone with a rubber duck.