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 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.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

Ego and pride is a two headed twist.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.

I had dreams of catching the ball for the final out in the World Series and being mobbed by my teammates. Well, I guess all my dreams didn't come true.

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

I believe that we parents must encourage our children to become educated, so they can get into a good college that we cannot afford.

It wasn't success, because Teller and I, by the time Asparagus Valley got together - within a year, we had achieved all our goals. I mean, our goal was to earn our living doing exactly what we wanted. Which is many people's goal.

Some people say the reason I am not married is that I don't understand small business and the toughest small business in the world is a family. But when you are happy and feel every minute of your life, what is the reason to get married?

The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.

Try and fail, but never fail to try.

My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn't think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it.

We don't have a divine right to success. So I agree with a lot of politicians out there when they say, 'We've got serious issues.' We do: immigration, infrastructure. I think income inequality's one of them.

If you call someone up on a mistake - if the drummer's put an extra beat in a bar or something - you have a lot more authority if you can show them how to do it right.

All actors are naughty. We're all troublemakers - horrible, attention-seeking children. 'Me, me, look at me!'

I've got some real diehards down in New Zealand; I look after them and make sure they always get tickets.

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't bless myself with holy water and then get in my car and rub the medal of the Virgin Mary that she gave me and say a Hail Mary for my mother. And then I kiss her Mass card that's right there on the dashboard.

The band would play on the night off for the local hotel bands and we'd back all the different acts. So I'd been advised by good friends of mine to come back to Hawaii. Oh, I loved Honolulu, playing at a place right on the beach at Waikiki!

Everything I do has an underlying political question.

Hairdressers are wonderful breed. You work one on one with another human being and the object is to make them feel so much better and to look at themselves with a twinkle in their eye.

I don't think I have spiritual beliefs in the structured sense - but I believe in the absolute necessity of spirit and a healthy spiritual life. It grew inside me by itself, which is surely the very nature of spirit, and instinctively I protected and nourished it. I also absorbed spirituality by osmosis.

It was there that, through a mutual friend, I met John Waters - proving what I've always said: you meet the best people on field trips.