If you were to give advice to somebody else… are there any special tips now that you give them?

Yes, I would. Do all your formal interviewing yourself. Don't employ anyone else to do it, the most important thing of all. You’ll get material ten times as valuable, even though the other interviewers are, in their way, expert, but they’re expert, usually, in a different kind of interview. That's the first thing.

The second thing is to follow your inner light… Find out what you’re really interested in, what you really want to find out about, what you really want to say, even though you may change very much what you actually say later. But if you can touch some kind of deep cord in yourself, you’ll probably have a good chance of doing something fairly decent.

And third is to observe. Get around, meet people and talk to people, in wherever they are. Pubs are not so easy now, because life has become much more house-centred… It was much more an open-air life then, because people didn't have cars, and they walked. It was a pedestrian society, which, I think, in many ways, is a great advantage. It's a way of meeting people. You don't meet people in the same way if you have cars all the time…

And last, … but, last, for God's sake, learn to write! … Unless you’re humble about your probable incapacity to write well, you’re not going to produce anything that's really going to make an impact on other people. That means not just taking lessons in writing, which you can do, from someone who can do it… But it means, of course, because very few people can write it quite well in the first draft, is to take a very great deal of trouble about it, and show it to people and see if they do understand.