The writer in movies is about as low as you can get and you really are a hired hand. You are paid a lot of money to be treated like dirt.

Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening.

I'd love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn't really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.

I suppose I have the tastes of someone who teaches at a university in the provinces.

I was getting rewarded for writing well, from about the age of five or six. A teacher would say, "Look what Andrew has written," and I thought, "Maybe I could be a writer."

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

An adaptation I was working on of Trollope's 'The Pallisers' has been axed by the BBC... I was also going to do Dickens' 'Dombey and Son' but they've asked me to do 'David Copperfield' instead.