Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

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

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

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.