There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.
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.
I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
When you've seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
My father was all brain and little heart.
I don't watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business - which at least does us all some good.
Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.
That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.
Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.
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.
It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.
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.
I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.
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.
