Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

In those days, it didn’t take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

There’s not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers – Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.

Charles Laughton, who’s a great hero of mine, only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever, which is ‘The Night of the Hunter.’ It’s full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio, I … Read more

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?