Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector...and miss.
I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.
There are these very poor communities on the outskirts of Cairo called Mokattam, where a lot of the garbage collectors live. I used to volunteer there, doing health and education work when I was younger and living in Egypt.
I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
I have some beautiful 20th-century drawings and a few paintings, but I'm not a collector, and I'm not particularly attached to objects.
Now this is a way to approach our healthcare problems: increase the number of tax collectors and decrease the number of doctors - brilliant!
What I do quite honestly and seriously and not in any way being humble is not as important as what the garbage collector does. People make actors important.
I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles' faces on it. It would be a collector's item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.
The Collector: Carina, get away from that stone! CARINA! Carina: I will no longer be your slave! [grabs the stone and gets obliterated]
I see a lot of people who love their jobs. I see some garbage collectors smiling as they go about their work.
In marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic; a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts; an enabler rather than a reformer.
How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
Some days, the music is not in tune, but it's always a song worth singing. That's the best description of a good marriage I've ever heard...
Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.
My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
A brick could be used to cook with, as a thickening agent in gravy. But as history proves, the thickest agents work for the government as tax collectors.
