I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.

We live and learn, and in betweenwe do the best we can.

I gladly sacrifice pear-shaped tones in favor of down-to-earth emotion.

It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them with a loving caress in his voice?

When you start falling for somebody and you can't stop thinking about when you're going to see them again, I love that. Women are beautiful. They deserve to be cherished and respected.

I thank God for this illness and these physical discomforts, because I have the time to converse with the Lord Jesus.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

A song is like a picture of a bird in flight; the bird was moving before the picture was taken, and no doubt continued after.

Pietas prevailed, and out of the blood of Caesar the monarchy was born.

It was fun to create characters who had truth to them but were also made up so as not to completely offend!