I reckon I closed down at least two films companies, one of which was in Ealing in the mid 1950s.

I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer's attention.

You get to Hollywood and you are in the land of big money where they don't like to see only one screenwriter's name. It's much better if you've got four or five.

I'd never seen any television before I started.

I don't judge other people's work and I don't see enough of it either.

Big Brother sounded like a silly stunt and that's what it is.

All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you're just playing about.

You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.

I reckon I closed down at least two films companies, one of which was in Ealing in the mid 1950s.

Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.

The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it.

Something like The Haunting is not worth the slightest consideration from me.

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.

I'm in my 80s and not a keen television fan.

People who believe in flying saucers are the scrapings from the bottom.

I made a rule for myself that the only television things I would do would be my own stories.

I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.

Moving around a lot allows you to experience many different cultures and learn about the ways that different people in different parts of the country live, and it probably made me somewhat more adventuresome and allowed me to meet my future wife in Pensacola.

It's always been my dream to just continually do really cool indie movies - character-driven stuff.

The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks.

The ancient boundary of Italy on the north was not the Alps but the Apennines.

I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths.

Students often approached me about state-paid tuition while I was out campaigning. After I explained to them that if the state pays their tuition now, they will pay higher taxes to pay other people's tuition for the rest of their lives, most of them ended up agreeing with me.

I'm not a household word. The climate for original music is always a bit difficult.

If you look at Governor Romney's family, he's been very successful. He's built a great family, very committed to his wife.

If you're improvising with Paul Reiser, man, you'd better hold on tight!

The only thing I can do is play baseball. I have to play ball. It's the only thing I know.

Sometimes we cant quite put our finger on something important because weve got our fingers wrapped around so many other things that are not important.

Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I'm on a horse.

I make appearance at local park and recreation agencies when the program starts, when they have the qualifying meets at the local levels. Then I try to go to the regional competitions, and of course I'm there in Hershey, Pa., in August for the North American final.

When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon - all served with black beans and rice. It's festive but different.

Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

NATO isn't going to be concerned about fishing.

L. Ram Saran Das was sentenced to death in 1915, and the sentence was later commuted to life transportation. Today myself, sitting in the condemned cell, I can let the readers know as authoritatively that the life-imprisonment is comparatively a far harder lot than that of death.

An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.

If somebody plans to carry out a series of murders... then this is obviously an evil and pre-meditated attack and in that case, there could be a deterrent effect.

Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

I just find the world very exciting and beautiful everywhere.

My mother has always been my emotional barometer and my guidance. I was lucky enough to get to have one woman who truly helped me through everything.

I grew up with Scientology - my parents at one point were clerical. It's a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it's had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It's not a threat or some cult.