We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
My films are about embarrassment.