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

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.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.