Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Central Europe is full of little countries standing shoulder to shoulder with no window to the sea. They are like the passengers in a rush-hour train which has stopped between stations for three centuries. And they all hate one another. And they're all crushed together waving their national flags, clanking their national chains, jabbering their national language.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, "What did they teach you?" And she said, "They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room." I'm happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I've never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I'm told to say.

I am told that you regret not what you did but what you didn't do; and so that's why I do everything, so as not to have any regrets.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.