If all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, where do all the audiences come from?

It's a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan it's when you discover that your wife left you in May.

There's an unseen force which lets birds know when you've just washed your car.

I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

And when you're on your own there is that terrifying possibility that you may be the only person on the planet who thinks it's funny - and you have no way of finding out.

If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it.

You know you're getting old when a four-letter word for something pleasurable two people can do in bed together is R-E-A-D.

What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?

Middle age is when, whenever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater.

A counter tenor is anyone who can count to ten.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.

When the first just and friendly man appeared on the earth, from that day a fatal Waterloo was visible for all the men of pride and fraud and blood.

Let's face it. Chocolate is the world's most well-loved food.

Educate yourself as much as you can with life. Just go out there.

I don't like to talk about things until I'm on set shooting them because it doesn't feel real.

Sometimes I cheat and buy things I used to make from scratch and just doctor them up.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?