It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience after seeing this version to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art because it serves audience expectations.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.

There is a lot of interest in the arts music theatre filmmaking engineering architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

See the 'On the Road' that came out in 1957 was censored. A lot of the honesty of it the bitter honesty is in the original scroll version that came out in 2007 on the 50-year anniversary. Back then there was so much post-Second World War fear that was imposed on everybody - 'You must live life this way' - and these guys were bored.

I was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested but I went into a diversion programme and by that time I'd already begun working in what was called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version but then you write the version that you can write.

I'm so happy to have been a part of that process and I would go straight back into the desert in a ton of chain mail for Ridley any day of the week. He's an amazing director and I can't wait to see the long version.

'The Christmas Song ' by Nat King Cole is not only a masterful performance to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.