If I can get someone to put on a dress, walk in a room, have them feel great, and have everybody think that they look lovely, too - that's my job, as far as evening wear goes.

Nobody is going to buy one of our dresses because it will do, or as something to hide away in their wardrobe and wear at some dimly undetermined point. They always have an event of some kind in mind. They want to walk in the room and for everybody to think how amazing they look. That's the job, really.

All I ever aim to do is make beautiful evening wear.

I like the challenge of dressing ladies in lots of different things.

I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?

I learnt so much wit, really, from the Globe audiences. If you can make a circle, even in a proscenium theater, if you can get a circular energy going, so that all these people are involved with it and present, then there is something curious that happens with the imagination.

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.