Exercise is an unnatural act.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.