“Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions.”

“It's hard to answer a question you haven't been asked. It's hard to show you tried unless you end up succeeding.”

“People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?”

“When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.”

“Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.”

“One asks and asks and always the answers become more incomprehensible than the question. In the end one becomes an idiot.
- EmBi”

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”

“People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy. Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?”

“But other people also 'invite' us to behave like victims, when they complain about the unfairness of life, for example, and ask us to agree, to offer advice, to participate.

Be careful. When you join in that game you always end up losing.”

“Dialogue is always tricky. Authenticity is almost impossible, and you always end up sounding too olde worlde. What I do is to strip the words back, so I get the dialogue to sound timeless…”