Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they're truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they're greatness as it were improves you.

I don't believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.

It may be that there is an afterlife and I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I will have had a crammed pre afterlife, a crammed life, so to me the most important thing is you know as Kipling put it. [...] To fill every unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.