I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone's property.

Being a mod is more of a sensibility than a style.

You could say I'm a mod, but with a small 'm'; I don't wear a parka, but I do question what I wear and what I listen to, which is what it's all about.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

I've got a stag weekend coming up and I've said I'm not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won't have it. I'll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

True heroics, obviously, is not the absence of fear, but having that fear and doing something anyway.

Sherlock and Watson are a love story

War is strange. In the beginning it is about people

Your husband this morning! Mine tonight! What do you take him for?''A man' smiled Cynthia. 'And therefore, if you won't let me call him changeable, I'll coin a word and call him consolable.

Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.

Most humans expressed affection by pressing their lips together, a simple act, so why would anyone feel the need to research the process?

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

Perception is a prism, and reality is like shot silk - depends where the light hits.

I've spent years when I've not been in the limelight at all and I'm perfectly happy living my life without being swooped on by paparazzi.

What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

There's a certain amount of what I wear that I wear for irony.

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.