It's a wonderful profession and it opens lots of doors and I think it's quite right that people can accuse actors and actresses of being dilettante but you learn on every job whatever it is the process moves you on in some way and yeah I want to expand my knowledge of our existence I suppose.

I mean it's the life lessons that I suppose you learn that nobody gets a free ride and that you do the best you can with the means that you can and try to open yourself to as much knowledge and all that that you can.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so knowledge remains better than ignorance.

There have been many different artists that have been inspirational. I suppose the question is directed to what was the reason why I went into fantasy illustration.

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic post-comet post-whatever it was so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven it is my inheritance I suppose.

I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content which I enjoy doing. What I really love doing is mixing that with humor.

The thing about For Better or Worse is the only thing that made me an okay director for that is that I have a sense of humor and it was supposed to be funny.

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that.

I suppose I miss the British cynicism and the humor.

I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

I kind of call myself an atheist I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist I hope.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

I'm just like so many women - I was frustrated I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on and you get home and you think 'What am I really supposed to wear under this?' So it was a frustrated consumer moment.