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

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

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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

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

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

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

Everything we do has consequences.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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

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

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 loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

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

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

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

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

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.

I know I have the mental capacity of a thousand bloggers, but because of that, my obligation to serve God is also that of a thousand bloggers.

Where we have been incorrect in what we have done, then I think we have an obligation to settle.

Basketball is in my blood. It is my obligation to try.

Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life's pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.

The Declaration of Independence says when government fails, the people have the right to replace it. Well, New York State government has failed and the people have the right, indeed the people have the the people have the obligation, to act.

We not only have a legal obligation to honor our commitments, we have a moral obligation to provide the coverage we promised to provide to these people.

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

When we ask American men and women in uniform to fight for this country and to defend this country's interest and then to send them overseas, there is no question we have an obligation to protect them and provide for their safety.

December 25th has become guilt and obligation.

So I think we have an obligation with our size to make sure that we are open to what people have to say to us because the people who criticize us, they're not all mean-spirited.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible.

The Chancellor also in effect asks us to bargain away whatever obligation or interest we have as regards the neutrality of Belgium. We could not entertain that bargain either.

It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted.

We as a Congress have a moral obligation to bring justice to the families of these victims. Furthermore, as a society based on laws, we have a responsibility to ensure that criminals don't go unpunished.

Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources - and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.