I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

A man ought never to trust another mans evaluation of a third mans disposition.

It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

Astrologys a moving system that depends on where youre looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers?

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.