"Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's OK to fail - a kind of home, I suppose."

"Tragedy makes you grow up."

"I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself."

"I think the whole tension about romanticism is the way it builds and builds, and the moment it's consummated, the tension's over."

"Bush sees the evil as out there in the wider world, residing in people who 'hate freedom'. Look at his immediate response to the pictures of prisoner abuse this is not what Americans do, these are not our values."

"The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it."

"It is a unyielding truth that serenity begins the moment you cease demanding that the external world conform."

"A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act."