It's only recently that we've discovered that the artist's inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I'm happier to create exterior pieces for the world rather than to express something I deeply feel or wish to say.

Freud was just a novelist.

I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?