Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he’s writing about. I think, you just can’t move them about, you know.

You never quite know what’s going to strike your imagination, or something that won’t going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.

The best of Mozart’s works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.

That’s what his stare has been saying to me all this time: ‘At least I galloped – when did you?

God was singing through this little man to all the world.

What did I expect of him? Very little, I promise you. One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual. One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you’re never short of customers.

All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean – from that whole vast intuitive culture – are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends – and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs – it sucks – it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles.