Deficits mean future tax increases pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.

And at the time it is funny how you can look at something and say for example with my shoulder injury when it first happened I said this is the worst thing that could happen to me. Why me why now? Now I look back and say it was probably the best thing that happened to me.

My mother was a terrific force in my life. Wartime-generation woman hadn't gone to university but should have done. Was very funny very verbal very clever very witty.

When I was a kid I didn't feel like I fit in because - this is really silly and I probably shouldn't say it but I didn't think anything was funny. So I used to go home and literally cry to my mom and my step-dad at the time and I didn't think anything was funny. I couldn't laugh.

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'

I'm like bursting. I should be working. I don't want to take a break. It's funny on set I don't have to go to the bathroom I don't have anything wrong I'm perfectly fine so through-and-through. I'm not hungry. I'm literally not even in my own body.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The one thing you shouldn't do is try to tell a cab driver how to get somewhere.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

I think they should have a Barbie with a buzz cut.

I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.

I always wanted to be somebody but now I realize I should have been more specific.

I believe that if life gives you lemons you should make lemonade... And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka and have a party.

I can tell you dearest friend that if it became known how much friendship love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.

Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.

Friendship is inexplicable it should not be explained if one doesn't want to kill it.