I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
Enthusiats are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don’t really mind.
Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it’s an endless stalemate.
Estate agents: like them or loathe them, you’d be mad not to loathe them.
Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.
But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian’s lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man’s truths – if other men had truths – and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.
I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.
Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.
A month’s salary, deep regret, the telephone number of some foul rehab clinic and my lance was free.
If you have been, I’m glad you’ve stopped.
Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.
No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.
I suppose the thing that really interests me is what mankind did with the big, big, big discoveries that have created our modern age.
I have Van Gogh’s ear for music.
I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.
After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don’t think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity.
You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture.
Not one word of the following is true.
I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband’s name, so now I’m Neil Patterson.
Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.