“"But this would be a beautiful place for a fight," he began again persuasively. "These great bare rolling Downs for the arena, — and me in my golden armour showing up against your big blue scaly coils! Think what a picture it would make!"
"Now you're trying to get at me through my artistic sensibilities," said the dragon. "But it won't work. Not but what it would make a very pretty picture, as you say," he added, wavering a little.”

“I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' I said, 'Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall.' I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises.”

“What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

“Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.”

“When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.”

“What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?”

“I think he's a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho, he had some moments. Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more — no, I don't want to know — about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.”

“Every now and again I get approached by "celebrities" [saying] "oh, you're doing a great job mate, I think it's wonderful what you're doing". Ok, and what you're gonna do? You're gonna make a freaking film now, aren't you? You're gonna make another bloody record! You're gonna stand in front of tens of thousands of people, you're gonna go on chat shows watched by millions of people! Are you gonna bring this subject up yourself? No! Why? "Me, me, me!" "I don't wanna affect my carrer!" I tell you… anyone in the public eye - come nowhere near me unless you are prepared to put your-bloody-self when your mouth is. Walk the talk or walk the other way!”

“Here I want to reiterate very clearly that this Little Mandate did not come to me dictated, or as a whole, but as I am telling it now. Get the picture: it could happen any place, any time, in the midst of a group, in my office, at lunch in a cafeteria. Suddenly a little light, a little added word would come to me. I used to write them down on scraps of paper, on the back of old envelopes, in some diary, maybe lost or forgotten now; though some of them are still here. It was a patchy thing.”

“We just dreamed it up, water would go into Ricou's eye-holes, so the only way he could see me was to turn upside down. During the whole sequence, he was supposed to be swimming underneath me and I wasn't supposed to know he was there. Every now and then I'd feel this scaly hand come up and skim my leg or my bottom and I'd say, 'Oh, Ricou must be there.”