I'm pretty good for an old geek.

I'm not an extravagant man. The fact that I can have a coffee out whenever I want still makes me feel grateful.

I think the most extraordinary thing about fans is the level of excellence that they show in the work that they do. I mean, if you go onto the internet and see some of the fan videos that have been put together, they're just extraordinary; they could be programmes in their own right.

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week. So the events that occur are rarely life-changing. But with film, you can say that this thing only happened once; this is a major thing that happened to these people.

The older I get, the more I think lightness of touch is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

When I first came to London, I loved hanging around in cafes, smoking, scribbling, dreaming. It was life-affirming and fun.