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Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

So at the end of the film I got up, and I was terribly British, I said, ‘So, who kind of liked the movie?’ And about a third of them put up their hands, and I thought, ‘Oh shit.’ So I said, ‘OK, who kind of didn’t like it?’ Two people. And I said, ‘Well, what else is there?’ And a guy in the front said, ‘Ask who really liked the movie.’ So I did, and they all put up their hands. And I thought, ‘Thank you, God.’

Dharma uses the word “God” with the frequency of a televangelist. It’s his way of reminding students that yoga isn’t gymnastics. Where other teachers urge students to “rotate the thighs inward” or “engage the quadriceps,” Dharma offers this instruction for refining postures: “Now, think of God.”

I was talking to Woody Allen’s manager, Jeff Rawlins, and he said he used to handle Lenny Bruce. I said, “Oh, I knew Lenny, what did you think of him?” And he said, “He sinned against his talent.” That line changed my life, I threw away all kinds of corruption out of my system, I just went back to being pretty normal.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Class determines destiny and income more certainly than it did 50 years ago. That’s a shocking fact for a country used to the idea of never-ending social progress.

Porto Cervo was built in the 1960s by Prince Karim Aga Khan and it has long been a playground for the super-rich. Earlier this month, the sign at the entrance to the Costa Smeralda was altered, apparently by an insufficiently prosperous holidaymaker armed with a spray can. The “Smeralda” was deleted and replaced with the word “troppo”, so it now reads in Italian: “It costs too much.”