I did spend about 5 years in the Griffin Theatre Company in 1978 actually , and worked therefore about 5 years on a voluntary basis. This was very much as a amateur, doing things like mopping the floor, handling props, setting up scenery, etc. I never acted, and don't think I'm an actor, but those years in the theatre taught me a lot about professional theatre.

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

The Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though.

In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.