“I hope I succeed in demonstrating that you may equally find compelling...” — Michael Portillo Quote

“I hope I succeed in demonstrating that you may equally find compelling and significant narratives - stories that alter or add to our understanding of history - in unprepossessing places: a Victorian sewer system; a Cold War bunker; derelict hospitals.”

“I have never served on a jury because MPs were exempted - or banned, I think.”

“I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.”

“As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.”

“Nothing scales quite the way a sci-fi feature does, I mean, you can always add more visual effects; you can spend a lot of money on the visual fidelity alone.”

“There's a lot of two-hander dialogue in 'True Detective,' and I needed to place those guys in locations where there were other levels of visual storytelling. It didn't necessarily have to move the plot forward, but it had to add tone or add to the overall feeling.”