Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.

Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind.

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

It's a great privilege just to be in a film not because you're some packaging that some agent has done with the studio exec: "We need a John Travolta film."

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.