“I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.”
“I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.”
“I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.”
“Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business - which at least does us all some good.”
“Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.”
“I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.”
“When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.”
“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.”
“As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.”
“But happiness is no respecter of persons.”
“Happiness is no respecter of persons.”
“I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.”
“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.”
“I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.”
“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.”
“Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”