"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."

"I'd like to impregnate her with a warm smile, listen to my children call her "mummy", be a comfort to her in her old age."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious."

"I've got no particular desire to play ten minute solos. Those were never valid anyway in my book -- never. It was just a cheap way of building up a tension in the audience...A solo should do something; it shouldn't just be there as a cosmetic. It should have some aim, take the tune somewhere. I'm not saying I can do it, but I try and take the tune somewhere."

"Jeff can play damn fast, but he chooses not to most of the time, and that’s what impresses me. It’s what he chooses to leave out rather than what he chooses to stick in."

"I used to practice scales, but I think mainly in positions. I do runs that go from position to position, basically around chord shapes. I can get around pretty easily from one position to another, and on a good night it sound pretty hot. I'll take chances. Sometimes I'll trip over myself, but most times I'm lucky."

"Well, I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it. Unless we feel like we're somehow on the right track then I'll keep on going. That's it, really; I don't have any magic where I just press a button and it happens. It'll either happen or it won't."

"In each human being there is an emergency exit: that is, the cult of self under a multitude of manifestations, which means that when an obsession becomes too violent, you can escape, vanish with a snicker."

"Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before. - to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918"

"The following evening John left with Lady Shorne for the south of France, without so much as a word to me. Alexa felt as if she were hearing that fateful cliche for the first time. "Without so much as a word." No matter how much she tried to see it from every point of view, its meaning was always clear. John was a coward. Anne was his victim. The roles were the opposite of what she had supposed. It was Anne who had been heroic, not John. John was a coward, a mere puppet into whom both Anne and Alexa had managed to breathe a semblance of life. He was as much the creation of one as of the other."

"You are my lover and I am your mistress and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination."

"Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise."

"I'd got to the end of my tether with the negative press. There's only so much you can take of every single day hearing yourself being called a slag or a bitch or a slapper or ugly or thick or whatever it is they're calling me. You kind of get to a point where you just don't want it any more."

"They build people up into this huge thing on the front pages that's talked about every day, like Sienna Miller, say, and then they just turn, they have had enough of you."

"I am only known for my boobs and tats."

"For so long I hid behind the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Now I feel like I've done it, I've done what I set out to achieve, now I can just go back to being me."

"Once you’ve been naked in a room full of 300 people, nothing scares you. I’m not saying everyone should become a stripper but forcing yourself to do something terrifying can change your life. You realise you can do anything."

"Most men – not just the men in Brentwood – are scared of powerful women with brains. There’s something in a man that makes him want to have power over a woman – whether it’s in the bedroom or because they earn more money. It boosts their egos."

"I could've been a lawyer by now, I could've gone to uni. But I've taken the quickest and easiest route to making as much money as I can, and having as much fun as I can, and I don't regret that."

"For quite a while I did feel like my brain wasn't being used at all. Obviously, when you're just modelling, you do feel a bit almost brain-dead, where you need something to stimulate you mentally and you're not getting it."

"I just think it's double standards the whole time. On the one hand people say, 'Oh, women have equal rights now, women can be as powerful as men and do the same jobs as men', but we're still not allowed to talk about sex, 'cos that's unladylike. It's like that old thing, if a man has slept with loads and loads of women, he's a stud. But if a woman has slept with loads of boys, she's a slag. Well, why? Why? What makes a man a stud 'cos he's pulled loads of women? And what makes me a slag 'cos I've slept with more than 10 men? It's ridiculous!"

"A very gallant gentleman."

"I am just going outside. I may be some time."

"Much fruitless speculation has been spent over supposed hidden meanings in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark. The inclination to search for these was strictly natural, though the search was destined to fail."

"If only he can draw grotesques, it would be all I should desire, the grace and beauty of the pictures would quite rival Tenniel, I think."

"He much disheartened me by holding out no hopes that Holiday would be able to illustrate a book satisfactorily."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"' 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."

"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."

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

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

"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 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."