A dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.

If I can avoid the mirror when I brush my teeth in the morning, I will. I find security and safety in the most profound degree of ignorance. If you can just stay ignorant of almost everything you'll be OK. It's fine to stay informed and look at things, but to judge things will bog you down.

Somehow you've been voted something for a magazine, and it's a complete mystery to me. I wake up and I have to look at that head when I brush my teeth every morning, you know. And it's weird. And it's unpleasant at times.

Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.

Tomorrow it'll all be over, then I'll have to go back to selling pens again.

I think kids, in general as an audience, are the way forward because they're not sort of sullied by intellectual expectation or this or that. It's a very pure kind of response to the work.

The problem is that everybody treats teenagers like they're stupid.