If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

By puberty I learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single minded.

The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.

If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you're thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.

Well this all seems like a bit of a storm in a teacup!

You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life.

I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid.

The only meaningful interpretation of any religious teaching is to honor the divine within ourselves and love the divine in one another.

The truth is: there is on this frequency, from our human perspective, a planet, some beings, some resources; would it not be sensible to employ systems that benefit the planet, the beings, and the resources?

Being famous is like a little bit of you is taken away and goes off and lives on its own and does what it wants... I wish it would do more interesting things!

I was like Elvis "The Pelvis" Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy. (him on the telly , me in a dingy alley... any analogy will break down under scrutiny.)

Strength does not have to be belligerent and loud.

The economy is just a metaphorical device, it's not real-that's why it's got the word "con" in the middle of it.

The most potent tool in maintaining the status quo is our belief that change is impossible.

Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.

He glanced first at me, and then at his devastated flowerbed; all plowed up and butchered, like a Ripper victim- like Pearly Poll, lying gutted in Hanway Street, Spitalfields.

If you don't choose heroes, heroes will be chosen for you, and they will not represent values that empower you, they will represent powers that will enslave you

The nation state is a relatively modern idea, and I don’t think we’re getting a lot out of it except for flags and World Cups.

That's what keeps me alive, perversion and star quality.

Every moment is a fresh new beginning, a wonderful inauguration of the great cosmic journey through the universe. We can do whatever we want. We can change reality at any moment.

All desires are the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God.

A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannised or anaesthetised into compliance.

I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you can't be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.

We are imprisoned within, hypnotized without, denying ourselves access to the internal peace and external harmony. Can we execute the perfect jailbreak when we have become our own jailers?

I was already a weary connoisseur of my dad’s pornography and had begun to develop my almost supernatural ability for guessing women’s bra sizes.

We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.

Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.

Mark Twain, the thinking man’s Colonel Sanders, reputedly said, “America is New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

This is why people get obsessed with festivals, or clubs, or drugs, or football, or other temporal approximations of togetherness; these distilled vials of the elixir are craved by our starved souls.

We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go, because, in England, he wouldn't be trusted with a pair of scissors.

When people are content they are difficult to manoeuvre. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies.

I deplore those long brown curly fingernail folk. I don’t even especially like people who have one long thumbnail for guitar. My mate Karl has one, and it scratched me the other day. I was sickened.

I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it’s apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.†

My modus operandi is that I'll be content with anything, as long as I know that it's the best that's possible.

In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn’t relinquish its lessons

Page 3 is a crazy concept whereby for no discernable reason, a national newspaper prints a photograph of a young woman showing her tits. I'd object but I'm too enamoured with the boobs...

I knew a man once who said, "Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.

The important thing to me is that I'm not driven by people's praise and I'm not slowed down by people's criticism. I'm just trying to work at the highest level I can.

I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person - they have a plan, an ideology, no matter how twisted. They're motivated.

I want to make movies that pierce people's hearts and touch them in some way, even if it's just for the night while they're in the cinema; in that moment, I want to bring actual tears to their eyes and goosebumps to their skin.

At 49, I find it a little bit difficult to run these days. I've got grade four tears in both Achilles, shin splints, I got no cartilage the toes in my right foot, I've got bone marrow edemas under both knees, I've got one degenerating hip - that's the problem you get.

I have a new horse. I get her to come to me from half a mile away. With just a simple call. That's because she knows that when she's with me, she's taken care of. She trusts me.

I'm not one of those fellows that is just going to have a psuedo-middling relationship.

Do I think Cate Blanchett is the most spectacular creature that ever walked the planet? Yes, I do.

We can't repay our good luck with bad grace. It invites darkness.

Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind, but an even greater gift is to discover a beautiful heart.

If there's anything about someone's life that's important enough to make a movie about it, I have to take responsibility to get all of it right. It's a huge responsibility.

What we do in life echoes in eternity

I've loved Danielle Spencer since 1989 - that's never going to change - and that's one of those things where I stare at her and go, 'How did it fail?' I still can't work it out, because my feelings for her have never changed.