You Are Who You Are When Nobody's

I'm Afraid I Was Very Much The Traditionalist. I Went Down On One Knee And Dictated A Proposal Which My Secretary Faxed Over Straight Away.

One Of The Traps Of Adolescence Is The Sort Of Paranoid Resentment That Somehow You're Never Going To Match Up And That Everybody Else's Life Is Going To Be Better And Finer And Fuller. That Everyone Else Attended Some Secret Lesson In Which How To Live Was Taught And You Had A Dental Appointment That Day, Or You Were Somehow Not Invited. And The Point Of Great Writers Like Wilde Is That They Make That Invitation To You.

We Are Not Nouns, We Are Verbs. I Am Not A Thing - An Actor, A Writer - I Am A Person Who Does Things - I Write, I Act - And I Never Know What I'm Going To Do Next. I Think You Can Be Imprisoned If You Think Of Yourself As A Noun.

What Other Developed Democracy Has Such A Ridiculous And Squalid History Of Intolerance? From The Imprisonment And Roasting Of Heretics, Witches And Poachers, To The Censorship Of Literature, Art And Television: From St Alban Through Wilde, Joyce And Lawrence I Think We Can Point With Pride To As Grim A Catalogue Of Intemperate, Bigoted Repression As Any Nation On Earth.

I'm Absolute Attacking My Own Instinct For Politeness, But I Think I Admire Artists Who Just Speak Out Or Who Are Strong, So It's Very Hard.