The world isn't made of atoms, it's made of stories.

I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.

Executive producers don't have to do anything. Nor do any kind of producers. They just sit around on deck chairs watching stuff, and if it gets cold, they leave. Actually I suppose as a producer you've got to be involved in helping out with solving problems.

I suppose I'm qualified to some degree to speak about the nature of contemporary media, as that's where I currently work. People, I think have been beyond trained - coded to not anticipate change; to think that change is implausible. Almost weaned off. It had to be a revolution bred out of us.

My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, ‘I want something.’ He didn’t know what it was. Not ‘I want sweets’, or ‘a can of Coke’, or ‘to watch the Tweenies’, or whatever it is they’re into now (I like Bagpuss), but ‘I want something.’ All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives.

I'm quite a neurotic thinker, quite an adrenalized person. But after meditation, I felt this beautiful serenity and selfless connection.