You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project.

I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it.

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.

I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time.

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

I'm a big gamer.

I think one of the joys of disaster movies is not knowing who's going to live and who's going to die.

I think 'Lost' didn't invent the flashback, obviously. It's been a cinematic tool. It's been around almost as long as cinema has.

If you're going to ask people to pay a premium price, you have to deliver a premium product. Not enough 3D movies have delivered on that promise. People got tired of it, and that's why they started to turn their back on 3D.

If you're going to make a horror movie, it doesn't get any better than 'Alien,' and if you're going to make an action movie, it really doesn't get any better than 'Aliens.'

Apocalyptic movies tend to thrive when people are concerned about the state of the world.

Pompeii is taught at schools in England, and, for a young boy, the combination of the Roman Empire and a volcano was irresistible.

'Pompeii' will be PG-13. I think it has to have a level of violence and death in it because you've got a volcano exploding. But it will be another PG-13 movie.

A pleased audience member is a pleased audience member, whether they're in New York or Mumbai.

I'm staying in my wheelhouse, not making any romantic comedies in a hurry.

There's another game that Capcom, who make 'Resident Evil,' have created called 'Monster Hunter,' which is these amazing, amazing creatures in these fantastical realms, I'm very excited about that.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

People see my films, and they cheer and they clap, and they are the kind of movies I like to see myself.

You can't just shoot your way out of every scenario in 'Resident Evil' games. You have to use your intelligence.

When I started working as a writer-director, that's when he became Paul Thomas Anderson and I became Paul W.S. Anderson. Neither of us can write and direct an American movie under the name Paul Anderson.

'Pompeii' is definitely a passion project for me.

I've had that recurring dream since I was a child, and a lot of people have different versions of that same dream, where you're running away from something, and it's going kind of slowly, but it's catching up with you, and it will not stop, and you cannot get away from it. Those dreams are manifested in different ways, but most people have them.

I've always felt that there's a lot of similarity between doing a comedy and doing a scary movie because jokes and scares are all about timing. If you give the punch line too early or too late, the joke falls flat. And it's the same with a scare.

I think 'Death Race 2000' is a classic, but it's a classic from the 1970s, and I think it's a particular kind of drive-in-exploitation movie satire masterpiece, and it was very much a movie of its time.

My grandfather, who brought me up, was a coal miner. I visited the mines with him. I remember it vividly. It was horrible. I'm glad I didn't go into the family business.

I grew up in the north of England, in New Castle, which is where Hadrian's Wall starts on the east coast of England and then goes across to the west.

When you watch movies in Britain, the reaction when people hate a movie is... they just politely get up and leave at the end. And when they love a movie... they just politely get up and leave at the end.

In the modern world, there's a real genuine fear of loss of individuality, and I think the undead speak to that. I also think the idea of the dead coming back to life, and this unstoppable foe that just keeps coming and coming but rather slowly just chases you, is a real primal fear.

TV is something that me and my wife watch a lot.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

I think, quite often, filmmakers kind of think so much about what the franchise will be and sometimes can neglect to put their efforts into the movie that they are actually making.

I've always - from my very first film, 'Shopping,' which was Jude Law and Sadie Frost, I mean, I've always liked strong women characters in films.

When I first came to Hollywood to make 'Mortal Kombat' back in the day, there was this rule that female-led action movies don't work and American studios didn't want to make them.

I started in television in the U.K., and I've always wanted to get back into TV.

One of my favorite countries in the world is Japan, and I've spent a huge amount of time there.

When you make people a lot of money, it gives you leverage in Hollywood.

The attraction of watching a movie called 'Alien vs. Predator' is you're anticipating - and the movie has to deliver - battle scenes and fight scenes between the two creatures.

What I love about 'Monster Hunter' is the incredibly beautiful, immersive world they've created. It's on the level of, like, a 'Star Wars' movie in terms of world creation.

The 'Monster Hunter' world includes these huge deserts that make the Gobi Desert look like a sandbox, and they have ships that sail through the sand.

DVD ushered in this era when you had to have additional footage, deleted scenes, things like that. There was no call for that back when we were just doing VHS cassettes and LaserDiscs.

We are definitely modernizing 'The Three Musketeers' without compromising the fun of shooting a period piece. But in our film, corsets and feathered hats don't take center stage. Our version is rich in eye-popping action, romance, and adventure.