My very, very first professional job was when I was 19 years old - I got a job doing an educational industrial film on Shell Motor Oil's oil products. I really put my heart into it - I wrote a script for it, I did a lot of research.
I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.
I was able to go from stage hand to floor manager to assistant director to director in a year because there was just no one else to do it and what I didn't realise and what people don't understand now about television is that we used to do about five...
It's tough, man. Unless it's a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that's all the studios are even doing. They've kind of admitted they're not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boo...
There's a dangerous bottom-lining, and super-summarizing that happens in a lot of our press and our media, and sort of our politicians' talking points, that's dangerously simple. I don't know a better way to say it. And there's usually a lot more com...
The Doctor: Doctor Song, you've got that face on again. River: What face? The Doctor: The "He's hot when he's clever" face. River: This is my normal face. The Doctor: Yes it is. River: Oh, shut up. The Doctor: Not a chance.
The Doctor: Oh, now what's this, then? I love this. A big, flashy-lighty thing. That's what brought me here. Big, flashy-lighty things have got me written all over them. Not actually, but give me time... and a crayon.
The Doctor: Just had a fall. All the way down there, right to the library. Heck of a climb back up. Amelia: You're soaking wet. The Doctor: I was in the swimming pool. Amelia: You said you were in the library. The Doctor: So was the swimming pool.
Young Reinette: Monsieur, be careful! The Doctor: It's just a nightmare, Reinette, don't worry, everyone has nightmares. Even monsters under the bed have nightmares! Young Reinette: What do monsters have nightmares about? The Doctor: Me!
We all change, when you think about it. We’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s OK, that’s good, you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.
I think that's the way people absorb television. All the explanations in are there if that's your bag, but they're not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand — it's about making p...
I think perhaps Pakistan can take the lead. Perhaps Turkey can as well, being part of Europe. But someone has to start talking about why the Muslim world has become a boiling pot and look beyond these cartoons to what the ideological reasons are for ...
The Christian Church has put a spiritual hierarchy on jobs. Ministers and missionaries are on top, then perhaps doctors and nurses come next, and so on to the bottom, where artists appear. Artists of whatever kind have to compromise everything to ent...
I'm a voyeur. I say that with no embarrassment. If I could have a superpower, being invisible would be it, no question. I'm fascinated by human behavior; observing people and seeing how much story gets told without a lot of dialogue, and how much our...
But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. 'Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they're living their lives at such an intense pitch that it was a completely different way...
I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.
I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting peri...
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
What I would say to filmmakers, if I may be so bold or so arrogant, is to draw inspiration from other filmmakers, but go to the place in your own gut where everything is nothing. That's a very Zen thing to say, but that place of nothing is where real...
