I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'

I always try to address where I am. I'll talk to the people and try to find out what it is about that particular place that makes it distinct from everywhere else.

Love in all its forms is very difficult ... to express. It changes, obviously. If you’re young, and you’re romantically in love with somebody, and often if you’ve just met somebody, its crazy! It’s completely overwhelming. You can’t think of anything else. You just want to climb inside the other person and live under their pancreas. And then it mellows, somewhat... to the point where you can barely look at them... without feeling a mild distaste

I feel very very old. My hair hurts. I have buttocks all over my body and I can't even smoke properly any more. I don't have lungs, I just have two poppadoms in here.

You're supposed to eat the cows. They're great big lumbering stupid things - they'd be everywhere if we didn't eat them.

The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.