Don't keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn't setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.

I watched 'Who' with a mixture of affection and exasperation through the eighties, always ready to cheer on the Doctor but seldom feeling that the series was playing to its strengths. Some of the adventures, revisited on DVD, turn out to be better than I remembered - others just as infuriating.

I've always loved far future SF, so it was more or less a given that I would one day want to write in that form.

I don't know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating.

I was a big reader of Zane Grey as a young boy, and so horses and the West figured large in my imagination.

Once I began college, I was committed to writing, which I think is different from saying I wanted to become a writer. I knew I would always write; I just wasn't always sure how I would go about doing so.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

A lot of the guys that work for Warners and make these big films there all come from the same film school. Like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, Tarsem Singh - they all went to Art Center in the College of Design. And there's a certain expectation when these guys graduate.