I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I've never been baptised.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

When I think of Simone now, I think of butterfly wings. Beautiful and excruciatingly delicate. Touch them once and they might disintegrate.

I was never punished for my ignorance

You tap in to this oneness and become part of the universe as a whole.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

I'm a human being. I'm not a piece of property. I'm not a consignment of goods.

There are levels of poverty in South Africa that are totally unacceptable.

I would not exchange the laughter of my heart for the fortunes of the multitudes.

I'm not a Tony Blair impersonator.

I think definitely people know me from playing creeps and weirdos, and I'm definitely looking to expand my range.

We're living in a world that says that if you engage in mass fraud, you'll be rewarded, but if you go down the street and steal an orange juice, you get arrested.