If you fall in love with a country and its people, that makes any country warm to you.

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

When I was at school I used to scream in trains, in those concertina things between the carriages. I used to try to be so good that sometimes I couldn't bear it any more.

My father was a painter, so I was encouraged to take a sketchbook everywhere. Cameras are perishable, but I still have tonnes of sketchbooks from all the trips I've ever been on. It gets you by when you don't know what to give people as a gift; drawings are good souvenirs.

Any film I see at two o'clock in afternoon with my mother seems to cast a strange spell that means we both come out sobbing.

People always like things that seem exotic.