London has always been a haven for victims of cruelty, and been improved by them. Yet I can see it changing now. Outsiders are demonised, there are little bits of legislation, people are scared.
Now I see that the journey was never meant to lead to some new and improved version of me; that it has always been about coming home to who I already am.
Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared [to register to vote] - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.
I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited, they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place, a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.
Some people have a phobia of midgets. They're, like, scared of them. I have the opposite - I see them, and I want to hold them down, cuddle them, be like, 'Come here, you little nugget. Who's your mommy now?' So cute!
It occurs to me that there's been a relatively recent tendency in the media to see prostitutes as victims and johns as exploiters. I don't think most prostitutes see themselves as victims or see their clients as exploiters, but that way of seeing prostitutes and johns is pretty common now outside of sex-work circles, and it's more shameful to be the exploiter than the exploited.
I'm a person of my own opinions, that's how I was raised. I speak what I feel... A lot of people feel the same way but they're scared to talk. They're really scared of the truth - they only want half of the truth. I've been living like that - forever in fear - but I know what to say and how to say it now. I ain't scared of myself. Y'all may be scared; I'm not scared.
Before, Indian people had been so defeated, they were always looking for outsiders, for the government, to somehow come in and fix things. But now, they seem to realize that they're the only ones who can save themselves.
I've always been following Chelsea and every time I came to London I would try to see a Chelsea game and see how the team was doing because it's been my dream to come to play here.
There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.
I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.
I have always been really scared of scary movies just because I live by myself - and then seeing something, then having a big imagination and then like thinking you see it in the middle of the night. So I've never been really into them.
You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so called age of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
To see talented people in roles that others might not see them in, to see how they might fit in the puzzle of the cast, has always been something that I've been good at. I think that if you look at the successes of my films and start to peel them back, there's usually a really smart casting decision that has gone into that success.
I think for a while now people have been scared to be out of TMT the commonly used acronym for technology-media-telecom stocks, which have tended to rise in tandem recently and the feeling has really been you have to be there...but now we're getting a dose of reality.
There's a lot of tension in London, but then you realize it's always been there, in its history, and that the best thing about London, that there's always been this tension.