I believe in kindness and niceness and lots of spiritual things, but the real intellectual rigor and quest of logic is something that I'm afraid takes incredibly hard work and we live in an age in which hard work is if not actively deprecated or denigrated it is run away from or ignored.

How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

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

Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.

The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.