The construction industry likes nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they can impose a brand new building, because that way they can make more money.

I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents' house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey.

As a driver I have come to believe that the person just in front of me and the person just behind me are always just about to do something really stupid. Tense is not the right word, but I am very hyper-aware of such things.

In creating a building, architects do think they're making the world a better place. And then they hope to make the world an even better place by making another thing which will be even bigger than the last thing... and it is part of the pathology of being an architect to believe thus, and they do believe it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I think television is a medium which has the potential to do great things but has been traduced by these... terrible people who rise through the ranks.

I've been offered radio but never done it, partly because the radio ideas that I've been asked to come up with, I've thought about them and then converted them to telly things.

When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.