It's only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it does, you don't want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he'd been having among the cannibals and what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for the awestruck 'Oh-h! Not really?', she had said that the whole thing had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably really been a prominent local vegetarian.

He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year's, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the win…

'And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or …

'But why do you want me? I mean, what am I? Ask yourself that.'

'Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama?' That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I woul…

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the …

I've always believed in experiencing everything in life. When you walk out with blinders on, you cut yourself off from the angels and the fairies.