I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.
Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.
A lifetime’s work, to try and say one thing that’s true.
If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.
I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.
I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later.
I love Stewart Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle' on BBC2. The guy is a genius.
Students who have attended my [medical] lectures may remember that I try not only to teach them what we know, but also to realise how little this is: in every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon to an end.
We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.
My goal has always been to try to live up to every ounce of my potential.
It's a great honor that something that you took part in creating becomes this forever object.