I think that's the problem with kids now. Everything is manufactured. And then they're sitting there watching the television, where all the work is done for them. Radio made me use my imagination.

I have always got medicine I want to give to people.

Now, anybody can make a movie, and I don't see that many great movies, because I think there's only a limited amount of talent out there.

I'm trying to escape by forming my own kind of world. Basically, I'm trying to encourage others to do the same.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

The English are such a frightened, nervous, insecure group of people - they no longer rule the world!

Fantasy isn't just a jolly escape: It's an escape, but into something far more extreme than reality, or normality. It's where things are more beautiful and more wondrous and more terrifying. You move into a world of conflicting extremes.