"The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in."

"The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself."

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

"It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions."

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

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

"The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?"

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

"Metaphor is embodied in language."

"Everything we do has consequences."

"To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there."

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

"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."

"The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination."

"Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word."

"Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative."

"As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous."

"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."

"Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art."

"I think childhood is to everyone a lost land."

"As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism."

"You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself."

"I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it."

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

"The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose."

"Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe."

"People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses."

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

"God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names."