My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.

Look... to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.