Quotes

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often think they have.

One obstacle always stopped me directing films - namely, having to say, 'Action!' My instinct would be to say, 'Er, I think if everybody's agreeable we might as well sort of start now - that is if you're ready'.

At 18 I thought that to be 'sensitive' was a writer's first requirement - with discipline and persistence nowhere.

My claim to literary fame is that I used to deliver meat to a woman who became T.S. Eliot's mother-in-law.

When [Harold] Pinter turned 50 I was asked to say something and couldn't think of anything. Later I thought there should be a two-minute silence.

I've no need to stand on my dignity or have to be a well-thought-of figure in the theatre. I can be silly - and there is a great deal of silliness. And I enjoy that. I never think there's enough silliness in life anyway. I think that's what wrong with politicians - there's too little silliness in Downing Street.

I often think of myself as the last person who is a monarchist really, simply because I simply can't imagine if we had anything in its place it would be anything but worse.

[on turning down an honorary degree from the University of Oxford in 1999] I'm aware of the arguments about bad money being put to good uses, but I still think that Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch) is not a name with which Oxford should have associated itself. Murdoch is a bully and should be stood up to publicly and so, however puny the gesture, it needs to be in the open.

[on the story that he had also had a relationship with a woman] The press - I think it was the Mail - got wind of it. And somehow they then outed me as *not* being homosexual. [laughs] It was just absurd. Somehow you weren't allowed not to be what they expected you to be. There's been something of both in my life, but not enough of either.

My partner was watching Wuthering Heights (1939) and at the end he said to me "You're rather like Heathcliff - awkward, northern and a c*nt".

[during a talk to a Women's Institute, recounting an incident that happened to his friend, chat-show host Russell Harty] Russell had been given some beta-blockers which helped to suppress the symptoms of nerves and stage fright. He put one of them in a tissue, meaning to take it just before his programme. But when he came to do so, he found it had dissolved, leaving a patch on the tissue. In the hope that some effective trace of the drug remained, he sucked this patch, and within a few minutes felt calmer and came through with flying colours. A second attack of nerves he dealt with in the same way. It was only on the way home, after the programme, that he felt in another pocket and found the original tissue with the pill intact. What he'd been sucking was some snot.

[at Fountains Abbey, as shots of the abbey are being shown] It's a sad fact but it has to be acknowledged that, whatever the sublimity and splendour of our great abbeys, to the droves of often apathetic visitors, the monastic life only comes alive when contemplating its toilet arrangements. Not monks stumbling down the night stairs at three in the morning to sing the first office of the day, not the round of prayer and praise unceasing sent heavenwards from altar and cell - what fires the popular imagination is stuff from the reredorter plopping twenty feet into the drains. The soaring buttresses of the Chapel of the Nine Altars at Fountains account for nothing alongside what remains of a fifteen-stall latrine.

I was very fond of my parents and got on with them. But that, of course, is a mixed blessing. Philip Larkin says "They fuck you up, your mum and dad". And if your parents *do* fuck you up, and you're going to write, that's fine because then you've got something to write about. But if they *don't* fuck you up, then you've got *nothing* to write about. So then they've fucked you up good and proper.

[speaking of Christopher Plummer to Kenneth Tynan] He's his own worst enemy -- but only just.

[talking about having his TV plays made the specialist subject of a contestant on BBC One's Mastermind (1972)] "It makes you feel dead - but lots of things do that".

I don't work on commission, I just do it on spec. If people don't want it then it's too bad.

[to Sir Ian McKellen who had asked him whether he was heterosexual or homosexual] That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

[speaking in May 2015, about The Lady in the Van (2015)] The story told by this film took place 40 and more years ago and Miss Shepherd is long since dead. She was difficult and eccentric but above all she was poor. And these days particularly the poor don't get much of a look in. Poverty is a moral failing today as it was under the Tudors. If the film has a point, it's about fairness and tolerance and however begrudgingly helping the less fortunate, who are not well thought of these days. And now likely to be even less so.

I tend not to watch anything where one person is eliminated each week. There was even a programme about allotments: I thought 'this'll be alright'. Then they introduced that format there! Allotments isn't a competitive activity.

[on Innes Lloyd] Since he died, television has changed so much. When I worked with him, it was so straightforward. I'd show him a script, he'd set it up and it was all very quickly done. Now it's a much more tortuous process.

The fear is that when one gets to the Last Judgement, notwithstanding the presence of God, it will be like the BAFTA awards: as long and every bit as tawdry.

[on Jonathan Miller] I learned quite early on in our friendship not to discuss what I was working on, lest it turn out he knew more about the subject than I did, or seemed to. It was always difficult to tell Jonathan anything, only to remind him of it.

[on the cast of Beyond the Fringe] We were all very competitive. One of the joys of going on to do things on one's own was you weren't competing with anybody anymore. The subsequent history of Peter and Dudley was a lot to do with that between the two of them.

[speaking in 1971] To an outside observer, my life must seem very boring. And why bring in an outside observer? To me it seems very boring.