I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.

I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.