My father comes from a generation of film that actors my age don't even know about which is really sad.

When I did the film Generations in which the character died I felt like a guest for the first time. That made me very sad.

People say the 'Lost Generation' in a romantic sense but I think it was tragic. They were really lost.

I'm a feminist but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.

I think the new generation is much more demanding about respect for the environment than we have ever imagined.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

The little religion that I have clung to-that what matters most is the continuity of life and its improvement from one generation to another.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family to religion to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.

I hate organized religion. I think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think you have to pick your own God and be true to him. I always say 'him' rather than 'her.' Maybe it's because of my generation but I don't like the idea of a female God. I see God as a benevolent male.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

Look you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.

I think I'm the most positive guy still going in my generation and I'm out there to prove that.

So the experts think we could have an AIDS-free generation in Africa by 2015 even if the mothers are positive.

But you see our society is still trapped in this binary black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

When you're young with less on the line it's easier to be audacious to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics sex drugs rock-and-roll etc. - to the comics page which for many years caused a rolling furor.