A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

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.

I love films. If I'd known how to get into or do it from the word go, I would have done that.

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.

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

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