I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.

Station to Station' came out of a sense of urgency - a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.

You don't look at a painting and ask if the artist was gay or straight. I think it's irrelevant in any situation - I don't care if my garbageman is gay or straight as long as he picks up the garbage.

Dark Shadows' was the spark that lit the fire of my childhood imagination. It wasn't polished; it wasn't perfect. But it gave us characters with real personalities and complicated motivations.