Paul Theroux

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

I have a naturally camp sensibility and a camp sense of humour. I love the icons that gay people love.

If this TV success had come in my twenties and I'd become a heart-throb, I would have been very stupid. I would have got into a lot of situations that I really wished I hadn't.

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.