"The crowd pressed round the dais and the band broke into the national anthem. 'Broke into' was the wrong expression. They ransacked it. Stone closed his eyes and clenched his fists to stop himself laughing as the wailing brass savaged his eardrums."

"One day, thought Stone, there will be a war and when you get to the front you will last five minutes before someone puts a bullet in your back."

"It was always the same in my experience, the greatest libertines make the most suspicious fathers, and show me a mother who would part her legs for a dray horse and you will find her daughter has a chastity belt before a christening mug. Why they deny their progeny what they find so pleasant themselves I will never conceive."

"The moneylender and his wife," he said indifferently, jerking his head over his shoulder. "It is always the same in any revolution. The moneylenders are always the first to go."

"Every day, thought Stone, is a revelation. At night it seems that you will never see it again, that it has been lost in the darkness. But with the sun, you hold your breath and look, and there it is. Just as it was; as you could never quite remember it."

"An Oxford man walks down the street and thinks that he owns it, a Cambridge man walks down the street and doesn't give a toss who owns it."

"The film is about what happens when real people do ghastly things to each other, and sure, it shows those things because that's the tone of the film — fairly realistic."

"I knew we needed brave actors - the story called for scenes that might be frightening to some - and we needed it to be real and believable."

"I suppose my mega heroes are the films of Michael Powell and Sam Peckinpah. I would have loved to have looked over their shoulder. I’m a bit of a cinephile. I love cinema. It’s an amazing medium. I can go and watch anything from very, very arty films to huge Hollywood spectaculars and everything in between."

"Making Donkey Punch was all about energy, speed and intense work."

"' is one of the most prophetic and disturbing films you’ll see, and I challenge you to find anyone who can find another film from that era which provides the same level of social commentary."

"And for the genre stuff I'm a big fan of Carpenter, Romero, Peckinpah, and Polanski, because they're unremitting and real and brilliant at showing characters under unbearable stress and unafraid of challenging us with uncomfortable truths as well as being just incredible filmmakers."

"The core idea was to be as realistic as possible and we wanted people to identify with the characters."

"Nic Roeg inspires me. He’s one of the greatest British film directors. His work is bold, challenging, cinematic and full of mesmerising ideas."

"I think Donkey Punch is an extreme thriller or an extreme reality-based thriller. The whole point of the film is it's grounded in reality."

"Donkey Punch is a very extreme, real-world thriller – it’s about characters and events that are based in reality and it pushes them into very dark and extreme situations where they have to do things that they would never have imagined. The film shows all this quite realistically and doesn’t pull its punches."

"Olly has created a distinctive and glamorous look that belies the fact that the entire film was shot in less than a month."

"The pure emotion, from a very early age, of seeing a film and feeling it take you over like a high... At first it was all the things I loved as a kid -- James Bond films and Spaghetti Westerns and things like that (which I still love). Then I started discovering the masters and finding out which films spoke to me and when they did -- the total immersion, the experience of being taking to another world for a couple of hours, opening your mind to new things and ideas on such an emotional level. How could you not fall in love with that?"

"I’ve directed a fair amount of stuff in the past, such as music videos, commercials and short films and I believe that the best way to learn in this industry – I mean, you can go to film school and that’s good – but ultimately, the only way you’re ever going to learn is through raw experience."

"I love films, I eat, sleep and drink them, and genre definitely had a huge impact."

"I think when you’re shooting on such a tight budget and schedule, the insanity and the energy and the sense of spirit is what makes the experience unique. Ten percent more isn’t going to make enough of a difference and anything that would — double the budget, triple the time — then you’re making a different kind of film."

"Director Olly Blackburn has, for the last ten years, been one of the most respected and in-demand directors of music videos and commercials."

"No one is evil, they just make very bad decisions. And no one has super powers, they only have their street smarts."

"Blackburn also took an interest in the dynamics of friendships between men and the psychological games that can become part of this."

"We grabbed their hands and dragged them home. Ah, I hope they’ve forgiven me."

"Dick Van Dyke was older than me and I was playing his dad."

"I wasted my youth on Wisden."

"What I really hate about cricket is, it's such a damned good game."

"And one's passions are so random and unreliable - cricket scores one minute, Swinburne the next."

"Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia."

"I turn over a new leaf every day," I said. "But the blots show through."

"[There's] too many people making too much muck and too much noise with too little space to do it in."

"Now, […] the world is beginning to look like what it is—overcrowded, dirty, noisy, smelly, and rapidly running out of resources. We're nearing the end of the rainbow, with not a crock of gold in sight."

"The 50s face was angry, the 60s face was well-fed, the 70s face was foxy. Perhaps it was the right expression: there was a lot to be wary about."

"Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?""

"Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?"

"As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems."

"‘In my business,’ she said, ‘I don’t think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.’"

"I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg."

"Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace."

"Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place."

"England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons."

"Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember."

"The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom."

"Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it."

"The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out."

"How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever."

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations."

"Women are more powerful than they think. A mother’s warmth is the essence of motivation. If we could liquefy the encouragement, care and compassion we deliver to our children it would surely fill an expanse greater than the Pacific."

"Her iron will won international respect. Her unabashed femininity gained women’s. Margaret Thatcher was a lady’s lady."