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

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.

But no, I don't generally have trouble with spelling mistakes.

Never underestimate a child's ability to get into more trouble.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

I once said, "We will bury you," and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

If I'm alone too long I think too much, and I'm not interested in doing that. That won't lead anywhere good, I'm sure. If I'm busy I tend to stay out of trouble. An idle mind is the devil's playground.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

The trouble with many men is that they have got just enough religion to make them miserable. If there is not joy in religion, you have got a leak in your religion.

It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

When you have a good script you're almost in more trouble than when you have a terrible script.

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.

I do have trouble with titles.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.

When I'm on stage, I'm trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don't go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it.

I was very lucky. Things happened, both bad and good, but I never got into real, deep trouble. But it wore me down. By the time I was 18, I was done. I didn't want to live the life any more. I needed to develop past the point that busking takes you to.

The way Americans understand and treat other peoples almost guarantees that the world will suffer more trouble.