“I could have been more famous if I did all the glitzy things, but celebrity always seemed so unnecessary … Fame and success are very different things, anyway.”

“I love simple things, I’m not really that turned on by the grandiosity of celebrity and fame. I love beautiful things… and I so appreciate all of the amazing experiences I get to have, and the finer things in life. But the things that really make me happy and re-ally touch my heart are just incredibly simple. I think I’ve always been that way my whole life.”

“We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true," I said. "That's how to act at a party.”

“I think there's a difference between a working actor, a movie star and a celebrity. They're all three different things.”

“Somehow, something always happens just before things get to the very worst. It is as if Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worse thing never quite comes.”

“It became very clear to me that there was such a thing as truth and there was such a thing as justice, and that they could be found and, being found, could be taught. It seemed to me that that was the most valuable thing that one could pursue. So I resolved to pursue this when I was twenty-one.”

“Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.”

“A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame. I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage to fame is that I have been able to give it a political use. Otherwise, it is quite uncomfortable. The problem is that you're famous for twenty-four hours a day, and you can't say, "Okay, I won't be famous until tomorrow," or press a button and say, "I won't be famous here or now."”

“He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.”

“I have always been ambitious, no doubt about that. I always felt like I had to reach the dizzy heights of fame and success or whatever the heights are of a number of given professions I have dabbled in, to prove myself, "Stripper of the year" a bafta or whatever, for me it was by creating something interesting and entertaining or moving, but not by compromising the thing I was creating, that thing had to reach those heights, I guess it's about being accepted and loved a bit or a lot.”