Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.

I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.

I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

It is really hard when the actor you pictured can't do the film.

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity.