Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin.

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books..

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading the….

To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; th….

It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to w….

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain..

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to ….

If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured tha….

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading sh….

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined..

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off..

I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to..

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control..

My films are about embarrassment..

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jerm….

I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don't think it was decided at that meeting. The trouble is, a….

... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate….

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on t….

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking….

Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards..

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception..