“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!”

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.

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition – and I have never suffered from it.

Everybody has barriers and obstacles. If you look at them as containing fences that don’t allow you to advance, then you’re going to be a failure. If you look at them as hurdles that strengthen you each time you go over one, then you’re going to be a success.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way – they make you look at the world in a different way.

What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

I’d love to travel more. I really look forward to traveling with my kids. I’m just waiting for them to want to travel with me.

Enjoy that you can see me now. I would love to see the great Michael Jordan and Julius Erving in their younger days, but they’re gone. Look at me at 50, I’m going to eat right and live right so I can take less punches and look normal.

Look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it.

If you look at the types of directors out there, I’m not as weird as most of them.