As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.

I certainly don't want to be formulaic. I want to be honest and authentic and everything else.

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.