A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options..

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound. It's always at the back of my mind - let's give up this silly bu….

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fo….

I acknowledge Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. They are prostlytizers of English socialism preaching to the converted and telling us what we already know. C….

Tulse Luper, who without too many confessions, in a sense, is a fictive version of me. I have to say he has far more exciting adventures, and certain….

Blind eyes cannot read..

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth..

Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else..

You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are..

Cinema is dead, long live cinema..

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible..

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not ne….

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward..

If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper..

Too many proofs spoil the truth..

All religions have always hated females..

I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis..

We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It's the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and ….

Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words..

I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situati….