The whole of my life, actually, from the time that I first got involved in showbiz through Leslie Bricusse, and I don't, as I hope I've made clear, deny that it was a fortunate moment. Because there was a yellow brick road and I did walk along it and I picked up quite a few yellow bricks on the way, and very useful they are too. But my idea of being a writer is being alone and doing things that nobody has commissioned and quite possibly nobody will want to publish.

In recent times, writers have had the feeling that we've reached that point because, of course, the net and various other things has made publishers very nervous, and they only publish, or publish a high proportion of crap, an even higher proportion of crap – they've always published crap – but my idea of being a writer was not collaborating with anybody else, it was not in being involved in the collaborative activity of the cinema, because that's what it is: I loved making up the stories, fitting the pieces together and delivering the first draft. After that, could we make it a bit more this? Do we have to do that? Could we possibly...? What about...? I get progressively more and more pissed off with that. I don't want to spend time with other people in a room having a conference. I don't believe in conferences – they waste my time. They don't waste the time of executives – they get paid to have them. I don't want to do that.