As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.

It's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.