I let people off the hook too easily.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.