I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.
I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.
I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.
We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.
Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them, and not just say, 'Oh, they're all the same. ' They are all the same in certain ways, alas - a political animal is such an animal. But lurking somewhere behind their rhetoric and their spittle are important choices that we should make.
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.
Metaphor is embodied in language.
I learned to play the piano on my mother's knee - that was before we got a piano.
The only thing that I'm obsessed with is sleeping, and actually, it is more than an obsession, it is a pleasure.
I love music, and I love singing.
Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.