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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
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The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
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Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.
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I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.
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I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
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And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.
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Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
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My mind gets into a verbal mode.
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The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
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I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
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When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
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Pirates could happen to anyone.
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The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
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One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.
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Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."
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I burn with no causes.
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Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.
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I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
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I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
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A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
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It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.