In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space...to be bathed in ... epiphanous delight.

It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.

You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

The Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though.

One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.

Doing something positive will help turn your mood around. When you smile, your body relaxes. When you experience human touch and interaction, it eases tension in your body.

Authority forgets a dying king

(It’s) a fair exchange. You’re giving me attention. That’s a form of affection, you know.

Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance.

Fashion is like a fruit, you couldn't eat it a day before and you can't eat it a day after; it's just about today

Read not the Times, read the Eternities.

I don't like being approached by people who look at me too intensely, who needed something from me that I didn't have. I don't represent anything.

If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.

Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.