I'm a massive pessimist.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

Everybody has flaws, and every country has flaws. But you can still love something even though you know it's been so wrong before, and sometimes is now, and probably will be again.

If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

I think that when you're queer, you grow up with these kinds of men who might have made you feel small because of who you are. They could be part of your family, or somebody on the street, or a...

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.