Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

I do enjoy doing the TV work, but I try to be careful not to do too much. Otherwise, you end up being recognised just for being on television rather than for your own stuff.

You got to like your work. You have got to like what you are doing, you have got to be doing something worthwhile so you can like it - because it is worthwhile, that it makes a difference, don't you see?

When you're doing a film, your agent and manager spend hours - days - talking about contractual obligations. If you turn up for work and ask for a peeled grape on top of foie gras but you don't get it, you can't get annoyed.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

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