Quotes from Michael Portillo

Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid.

Whenever I'm in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood - as do other family members.

I feel opera is an expression of artistic excellence. To do it is expensive, as there's a requirement for an orchestra, good voices, excellent sets, and the fact that productions generally have only short runs. But I believe it's something we ought to achieve as a nation.

Wagner had a terrific understanding of politics. In 1829, he was a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to bring down the establishment. He hated religion and churches, which he said enslaved people. But he later developed different views that put art at the centre of the life of the state.

My favourite British line is the West Highland line. It was built across moorland where no one had succeeded in building a road. So everything in that area is there because of the railway line.

For someone like me, making a documentary - I don't kid myself. There's no influence at all. What I do is entertainment. I would even say much the same about the column I write in 'The Sunday Times.'

Personal responsibility matters.

My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear's a bit bigger than my left - which showed up particularly in school photographs - so my mother used to call me her 'little Picasso.'

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

I look back on my schooldays with a warm glow of nostalgia.

Conservatives are wary of change. We have respect for things that have lasted a long time and have been proved to work. When things need changing, we should make the changes with respect to all the reasons why those things worked originally as well as the reasons why amendment is necessary.

My Scottish grandfather, John W. Blyth, was a man addicted to paintings. A manufacturer of linen, he spent all his surplus money on pictures.

I was brought up in a house where I was so aware of a life that had been broken by politics and conflict.

The true symbolism of every facet of 'Guernica' can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.

In any family, the joy of a wedding must be tinged with a little anxiety. So many marriages fail. Luckily, people often get over such traumas. But for the Royal Family, marriages carry the gravest dangers.

As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.

Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions.

It's a dilemma for every modern parent - how to keep children safe on social media without monitoring their every post.

We must have a welfare system that we can afford, which will mean giving greater attention to directing the welfare program toward its primary purposes and its intended beneficiaries.

A vocation is a noble thing and not to be subverted by the whims of politicians.

If a prince marries a foreign princess, one to the manner born, he is being snobbish and old-fashioned. If he chooses a Diana or a Fergie, glamorous outsiders, they may never adapt to the restrictions of being Royal, with calamitous results.

People wear extraordinarily bright colours in India.

If life is a soap opera you shouldn't be in too much of a hurry to get to the final credits.

One enjoyable consequence of being in the Scouts was that, at the start of each new school year, we had to camp out in tents on the school playing fields.