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.

The afterlife is whatever a soul wishes or believes it to be.

In my experience lust only ever leads to misery. All that suspicion and jealousy and anguish it unleashes. I don't want those things in my life.

Nobody and nothing will stop Russia on the road to strengthening democracy and ensuring human rights and freedoms.

I'm looking for the truth. The audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves.

Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It's like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.

Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways

Whatever I do, I hope it's quality, I hope it's something that's class.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can't crank it out - I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven't done already.

Its very important to be just to other people. It takes years and years of living to learn that injustice against oneself is always unimportant

So at 16 I got a job at the local radio station. And I was working after school and weekends. I did the news; I did everything. I did - played records.

Actors who perhaps are super-confident and have absolute belief in themselves I always admire, because I can't really be like that. Because you never know what's right: what you feel inside versus what is portrayed.

Thanks to my father, we were always in good horses.

Think about doing a bunch of stunts in leather. What does leather do? It doesn't stretch, it rips.

If you don't like me, if you like me; both are equally cool. I send love and positive energy to all those people in their lives. I hope they find where they're meant to be.

A good man, though he will value his own countrymen, yet will think as highly of the worthy men of every nation under the sun.

Life is too short to waste.

Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.... when you start hating anybody it destroys the very center of your creative response to life and the universe so love everybody.

The most important thing you'll ever wear is your attitude.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

I've said all along that God is in control.

At base, financial literacy is inextricably connected to control over one's future.

With Charles Woods, it was the first time I had ever seen tissue from a dead person used to save a human life. It piqued my curiosity.