The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

There's a great tradition at the BFI of giving fellowships and I thought one of the great jobs that I'd have at the BFI would be to give them out on a regular basis.

The best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic. I gradually calmed down and I got home. But the reality was that in that moment I was panicking and I feel like that to me was the clue about Ripley, that Ripley constantly finds himself out of his depth in the film and then reacts very, very badly.