Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.