I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.

Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.