The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

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.

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.