Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.
I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.
It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.
I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.
Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.
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.
The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.
I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.
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.
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
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.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
I don't believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods.
Generally, we admire the thing we are not.
Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.
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.
But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.
You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.
There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.
