I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened.' Pretty much never.

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

Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.

What I would be quite wise to remember is that ‘pieces’ are not the end of what was, but the beginning of what is to be.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart.

We do what we like, and we like what we do.

The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

Vision and priorities should precede actions. Actions should be judged through the prism of how the firm adds value and the key competencies it seeks to build.

When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons.

We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change.