"[from trailer] Are we going to appal you with something confidential and disgusting? Let's hope so, because that is what you really like. Unconfessed crimes of buried wickedness - if that is what brings you to us, the prospect of hearing horrors, you shall not go unrewarded."

"Everything you've heard is true."

"The man... The music... The magic... The madness... The murder... The mystery... The motion picture..."

"Your merciful God. He destroyed His own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory. He killed Mozart and kept me alive to torture! 32 years of torture! 32 years of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter, all the time fainter till no one plays it at all, and his..."

"[to Father Vogler] My plan was so simple that it terrified me. First, I must get the death mass and then I must achieve his death....His funeral! Imagine it! The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin, Mozart's little coffin in the middle. And then, in that silence, music! A divine music bursts out over them all. A great mass of death! Requiem mass for Wolfgang Mozart. Composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri! Oh what sublimity! What depth! What passion in the music! Salieri has been touched by God at last. And God forced to listen! Powerless, powerless to stop it! I, for once, in the end, laughing at him! The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? Hmmm? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it. Very different when, when you, when you have to do it with your own hands."

"So rose the dreadful ghost from his next and blackest opera. There, on the stage, stood the figure of a dead commander. And I knew - only I understood - that the horrifying apparition was Leopold, raised from the dead! Wolfgang had summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the world! It was terrifying and wonderful to watch. Now a madness began in me. A madness of a man splitting in half. Through my influence, I saw to it Don Giovanni was played five times in Vienna. But in secret, I went to every one of those five - all alone - unable to help myself, worshipping sound I alone seem to hear. And hour after hour, as I stood there, understanding even more clearly how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son from beyond the grave, I began to see a way - a terrible way - I could finally triumph over God."

"[addressing a crucifix] From now on, we are enemies... You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your incarnation."

"[to Father Vogler] All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise Him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?"

"[about the beginning of the third movement of Mozart's Serenade No. 10] Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing! The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. And then, suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God."

"That was Mozart. That! That giggling dirty-minded creature I had just seen, crawling on the floor!"

"While my father prayed earnestly to God, to "protect commerce", I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: "Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life. Amen". And do you know what happened? A miracle!"

"Oh say, can you see / my eyes? If you can / then my hair's too short."

"The draft is white people sending black people to make war on the yellow people to defend the land they stole from the red people!"

"Of course I'm crazy! We're all crazy. Let's shake on it."

"[singing] This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius!"

"I've been to India And saw the yogi light In South America The Indian smoke glows bright I'm reincarnated and so are we all And in this lifetime We'll rise before we fall"

"Jamie Parker - Scripps"

"Russell Tovey - Rudge"

"Andrew Knott - Lockwood"

"Frances de la Tour - Mrs. Lintott"

"Richard Griffiths - Hector"

"Stephen Campbell Moore - Irwin"

"James Corden - Timms"

"Samuel Anderson - Crowther"

"History. It's just one fucking thing after another."

"Meet The Boys Who Are Making History!"

"I was a geographer. I went to Hull."

"On enquiry I find his pupils know all the words of "When I'm Cleaning Windows". And Gracie Fields, Dorothy, Gracie Fields."

"I said it from the start: you can't polish a turd! (About Rudge)"

"One oddity: Rudge. And Christ Church of all places! Might get into Loughborough... on a bad year... otherwise all brights!"

"I want to be up there with Manchester Grammar, Haberdasher Askes, Leighton Park... or is that an open prison? No matter."

"They're good... but they're crass. They need polish... edge."

"Turning facts on their heads. It's like a game."

"The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers... It's consolation. All literature is consolation."

"History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind... with a bucket."

"How do I define history? It's just one fuckin' thing after another."

"[on Hector being sacked] No more genital massage as one speed along leafy suburban roads. No more the bike's melancholy long withdrawing roar as he dropped you at the corner, your honor still intact."

"The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn't want war. Yeah, there's an arms race, but it's Britain who's leading it. So, why does no one admit this?"

"But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust."

"Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on."

"I would hate to turn out boys who, in later life, would claim to have a love of literature, or speak of the lure of language, and their love of words. Words, said in a way that's somehow... Welsh."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

"Remember boys: festoon your answers with gobbets, and you won't go far wrong."

"Clive Merrison - The Headmaster"

"Sacha Dhawan - Akhtar"

"Samuel Barnett - Posner"

"Dominic Cooper - Dakin"

"Margaret Dumont - Mrs. Rittenhouse"

"Edward Metcalf - Inspector Hennessey"

"Robert Greig - Hives, the butler"