St. Michaels Mount is a favourite place of mine; people will walk across to the Mount all day and assume they will be able to walk home. The spectacle of hundreds of people realising that the path they walked over on is disappearing under several feet of water is very amusing.

I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

The lifestyle that an artist can have, the freedom to wander in the landscape with no real pressure or deadlines, was a very attractive one.

Painting is really good fun, I have always enjoyed it. As long as I paint what I want with the freedom that I enjoy, I never tire.

I worked with Jack Nitzsche for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' and we'd booked a symphony orchestra. He dismissed them and came with a little man who poured water into glasses of different sizes to make a glass harmonica. And most of the music for the film was that - with some Indian flutes and some drums.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

Whether it's theatre or TV or film, you're hoping you're going to bump into a writer that's got a bit of honour in him, that wants to tell a good story and is able to tell it well.

From a child, I had an inordinate desire for knowledge and especially music, painting, flowers, and the sciences, Algebra being one of my favorite studies.