I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

I do like being surprised by directors and producers and being offered parts I would never have considered, including parts that aren't necessarily obvious but which would test me.