The older I get, the more fun it is to write young people. It's just a holiday from what is becoming old age, really.

From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.

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.

I'm absolutely delighted if people think of me as a reliable purveyor of quality period stuff.

Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.

As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."

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."