“My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they’ve read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!”

I did not vote Labour because they’ve heard of Oasis and nobody is going to vote Tory because William Hague has got a baseball cap.

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.

You think I look like a teletubby?

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

You didn’t wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY.

I see dull people as projects … to be reformed

Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.

Yes, OK, farty is a silly word. I wish I’d never used it. I’m 34. Perhaps it was a word for my 20s.

Artists don’t create society, they reflect it

If I did things for the money, I’d have done adverts in the 1980s, when I was hot enough to be offered them, and ‘Police Academy 6,’ which I was asked to write.

I’m lucky because the strongest emotion I have ever felt is being in love, and that definitely informs my writing.

I don’t know what people who I’ve never met think about me. Some have written horrible things, some have written nice things – but I’m proud of the fact I’ve remained close to everyone I’ve ever worked with.

No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

The more you look down on others, the less ANYBODY will look up to you.

If you look beyond the short term violence and instability, you do see significant activities on the part of the Iraqi people that indicate they understand the commitment necessary to govern themselves. Its not clear how they will do it, but it never is.

C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good

Tread gently on anyone who looks at you sideways.

I’m delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we’ve got something to look down on.

I think the Republican Party is… accurately defined as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy.

When you look at women who have had plastic surgery, they have lost something – usually an expression, something unique to their face.

Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.