You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

Politicians often like to suggest that their policies come about through objective thinking, but if you look at British fascists, for example, what you see - what I see - is a group of people coming to the decisions they came to because something happened to them when they were nine-years-old, or because of some deep prejudice that formed in them subsequent to that.

Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.