Generally, we admire the thing we are not.
There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.
When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.
To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
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.
You’ve just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.
I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.
Stop wanting wealth and fame and start wanting instead to do something well about which you are passionate.
Things are always worse in the steady watches of the night.
Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.
The church has no power over our lives any more, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws...
That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.
You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don’t. It’s not all soft and lovely. It doesn’t ask to be loved.
You can’t just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.
Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes.
A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.
I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.
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.
The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church, in a nutshell.