Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments it is apt to emerge again and again independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say 'this is where I want to be... I want this look.

So if I design it and then go away it's still living somewhere and it still exists by itself without me.

When I was very very young seven years old I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.

I'm not a size 0 and I'm nowhere close to it. But I don't want anyone to know what I am so I like to design clothes so you don't know what's going on under there.

Once you understand this way you will be able to make your room alive you will be able to design a house together with your family a garden for your children places where you can work beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.

When you say 'design ' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks whereas for me design is pretty much everything.

Music is where I have the most creative freedom but I love producing. To me that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director sometimes picking a writer to the actors the wardrobe set design editing music and marketing.

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where like all desert dwellers they dream their buildings rather than design them.

A purpose an intention a design strikes everywhere even the careless the most stupid thinker.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums concert halls and civic buildings.

If the human condition were the periodic table maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power I reckon would be where oxygen is.

In these dangerous times where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and we should reach out to each other and bond as a community rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.

When I was younger I wasn't concentrating on good days. I was managing a career and trying to have a good year. It would always 'lead' to something which never leads to anything except death where everything leads to. And then as I got older and then I had my kids and everything I began to appreciate a great Wednesday.

I will admit like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.

Loss and possession death and life are one There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful.

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.

Death is inevitable but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

Death in itself is nothing but we fear to be we know not what we know not where.

I'm one of the slowest drivers on the road. I mosey along. If you're doing anything too fast including living life too fast that creates sudden death. If I have to be somewhere on time I make sure I leave early enough.