“You’re being watched too, remember?”“I wasn’t aware—”“That some of the screens you’re looking at are looking at you?”“Yes.”“Well, they are.”

“I’ve spent my creative life so far first in the theatre, then on the page, then on the screen, examining what is turning out as I grow older to look like one enormous landscape. What I originally thought were different worlds turn out to be one interconnected place. And like a bedspread viewed by a sick child from his pillow, I am very aware that there are colours in various corners which I know very well, but I haven’t yet found the ways to get from the blue to the green and from the green to the red. I’ve just begun, and I suppose that’s become my preoccupation – the idea that at one point I will see it clearly.”

“…there’s nothing in the world more fun than doing something you’re good at.”

“It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of thatphrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.”

“Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.”

“I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.”

“Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.”