Comedian

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

My father was all brain and little heart.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

I don't watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.

There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.