...the reality of intelligent British speech... uses blasphemus, coital and cloacal expletives as a matter of course.

I now accept that it is looking increasingly likely that Tiger Woods is, in fact, straight.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't. It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian 'correctively' raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.

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.