You'll often hear the phrase "science doesn't know everything." Well, of course it doesn't know everything. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean that it knows nothing.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

I met too frankly preposterous, if it weren't for their banal evil, politicians and pastors who told knowing lies about the evils of homosexuality in order to attract bigger flocks to their churches and more votes and power to their corrupt councils. LGBT people seem to be being scapegoated more and more just as at the same time in more enlightened countries more and more freedom to express themselves, marry, be given official intersex status and so on is offered.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

When Steampunk meets adventure and adventure meets comedy and comedy meets ingenuity and ingenuity meets charm and charm meets wonder and wonder meets pleasure the result is a Triumph. Dr Grordbort is the future. And the past. Which makes an ideal present.