This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.

I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.

Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.

It's certainly easy to mock some things ... Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me.

As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly... yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.