Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

You see, I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

It's great to get out of the study and work with real living and breathing people.

There was a moment in the early '80s when I wanted to work on films and wanted to live in L.A.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.

If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right.

My problem is I'm a man of no convictions - at least, I think I am.