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

The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.

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.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

The only times we are consciously aware of the authorship of a photograph, I would argue, are when we contemplate the photographs we ourselves have taken (or those of friends and family) or when we go deliberately to the photographers monograph or exhibition. The signed image - the appropriated, the owned image - is by far the rarest in this pullulating world of pictures.

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