Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.
Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There’s very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I’m lucky enough that it’s reasonably mild in my case.
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.
There are some things I don’t like, about which I think, well, that’s me. But coriander is a giant hoax perpetrated by a perverted society.
You don’t need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.
Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That’s why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.
How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?
It is astonishing how articulate one can become when alone and raving at a radio. Arguments and counter arguments, rhetoric and bombast flow from one’s lips like scurf from the hair of a bank manager.
It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.
Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.
Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.
Hey-ho, it’s raining inside: it isn’t my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow and when it does, I shall take full advantage.
It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.
Self-consciousness, that’s what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What’s the trick?
How to separate the humiliation from the loss, that’s the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.
I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.
Sometimes there just isn’t enough vomit in the world.
I’m afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away.
If there is a sort of national American emotion I would call it optimism. If there is an English one I would call it embarrassment – not even pessimism – just sheer shame, embarrassment and confusion.
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.