I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.