I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.

I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.

When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.

For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.

Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.

London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.