I never think of myself as any kind of sex symbol but I get letters from all over all sorts. It's really cool. I get a lot from inmates which is kind of scary. But the best was the guy who wanted to send me a plane ticket to fly me to his prom.

When I grew up we had gym at school two or three dance classes after school ice skating lessons and all sorts of sports at our finger tips. We weren't glued to computers because they didn't exist so being active was all we knew.

You don't have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians. You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act on a hair trigger - where they can't afford to be second to strike - the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence is simply too high.

I like the desert for short periods of time from inside a car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them.

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one things that simply won't be got rid of.

A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change.

There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things.

I never felt totally 100% patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon and Damascus and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.