Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.

I did a very stupid diet where you have three food groups, and you never eat them together. It's so bloody tedious; I'm losing the will to live just describing it. I managed to stay very thin because you spent your life wandering around starving hungry looking for a chickpea to go with a chicken leg.

I'm blessed to come from a family with five brothers. We're all physical and athletic and like to work out, like to be outside, like to throw the ball around. We spent our entire childhoods on some kind of corner or in a field. We still do a Turkey Bowl every Thanksgiving. It gets competitive, man. Bloody.

I sat in on some songwriting classes, and it was really bloody hard, a lot of music theory. I'd be sitting there, and they'd be talking all this music theory, and the teacher would say, 'Let's ask our guest Jimmy what he thinks,' and I'd be sitting there thinking, 'Please don't ask me, please don't ask me.'

I did a lot of musicals when I was young and finally went to drama school to try and get away from doing musicals... and of course the first thing that happened when I got out is I got offered a musical. And then when I got to the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was my next job, I ended up doing a bloody musical!

If you persist in your purpose of secession, there will be war - a bloody and cruel war. Not only will the North fight, but she will also triumph. The experiment of secession will fail, and the South, in ruin and desolation, will bitterly repent the day when she attempted to overthrow a wise and beneficent government.

You know you get a tube of toothpaste... such a bloody con. You squeeze and squeeze and nothing more comes out? Well, take a pair of scissors and cut it about an inch and a half from the bottom and it's absolutely packed with stuff! I do that, then cut off the top bit, so I can stick that back on and it doesn't dry out!

My understanding is that we are generally a very philanthropic and compassionate people - that when there are disasters in the world, individual citizens send loads of money into appeals for different things. We're a bloody violent people, football fans, and we've been successful at wars, and we sell far too many weapons.

Everyone said how brilliant of Tom Conti to be in bed in 'Whose Life Is it Anyway?' and only have his head to act with. He should be so bloody lucky. I'm not for a moment disputing that Tom Conti is an absolutely brilliant actor. But he should be so lucky to be stuck upstage in the spotlight, with everyone focused on him.

Who do you know, who could come out on a flying carpet? P. Diddy standing at the bottom, come out like a concert, dancing, oozing confidence, and then get in and take somebody out? Come on, do you know anybody in the history of the sport that did what Prince Naseem did? I ain't trying to brag, but I was bloody good at it.

For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.

Before I read the 'Bloody Sunday' script, I have to admit I hadn't thought about it that much. There was probably even part of me which assumed there was no smoke without fire. That the Catholics who were shot must have done something to provoke such a response from the army. I was extremely ignorant of the whole situation.

I came to the U.K. at the age of 19 and I didn't know anything about the working-class tradition, the Labour Party and the unions. I learned it. And in doing so, I came to appreciate that, if you're going to intervene politically, you'd better bloody well know something about the class on whose side you want to align yourself.

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.

When you think of Grimm's fairy tales, they are deeply, deeply psychological. They're so powerful, so bloody, and really, really disturbing. Think about five-year-olds reading that stuff. Even 'Little Red Riding Hood' is a really freaky story. Grandma is gobbled up by a wolf, and the wolf is going to eat the girl. That's scary stuff.

When I first started writing comics, in the way-back days, Typhoid Mary was my explosive response to women characters in comics - I made her an innocent virginal type, a clever, dark, liberated woman, and as Bloody Mary, a feminist bent of punishing men - all in one character. She was an instinctual rather than a calculated creation.

I gotta tell you, right at the top of my list would be taking vitamins. I know that over the years doctors have said they're ridiculous and all that. But I started taking my vitamins at an early age. And I take them every day. Every bloody day! So I think that's number one. For whatever reason, I feel active and pretty good at my age.

I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

I'm a teller of stories. I put bloody skins on my back and dance around the fire, and I say what the hunt was like. It's not erudite; it's not intellectual. I sail, run dogs, ride horses, play professional poker, and tell stories about the stuff I've been through. And I'm still a romantic; I still want Bambi to make it out of the fire.

I swear that he is an alien. There is something about his phrasing that is so unpredictable and cool. It makes you wonder where it came from. I wish I could play like that. I listen to Jeff Beck and think, 'Bloody hell!' The way that Jeff Beck and his band play together is just amazing. Yeah, those guys definitely come from another planet.

If you look at 'American Horror Story' or 'Crime Story,' these are visceral, action-packed, sometimes bloody episodes of television. They're not 'feminine.' They're not about sexy women sitting around looking beautiful, drinking lattes. These episodes are calling cards to show companies like Marvel, 'Look, women can do these kind of movies.'

I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

Mother's father and brothers all took great interest in pugilism, and they knew the game well from much practice of their own. They were never so much delighted as when I visited them with a black eye or a bloody nose, at which time they would be at the trouble to give cunning points as to how to meet an opponent according to his weight and height.

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