One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you.

I'm afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.

All the big words -virtue, justice, truth, ...- are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

I knew I couldn't believe in God, because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook.

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.