I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.

Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.

Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.

I call the '70s the "golden age of television"; in the early '70s there were sensationally good shows.

I would say on the other side of the equation that there were really some massive sales and massive enthusiasm for some films that were given big releases. And I'm not really sure that happens in quite the same way, small films getting big releases. Maybe it still does, I don't know.

I think it's helpful to aspire to make films if you feel that other people are not doing what you want to do.

I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.