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I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

When I'm reading a script and I see the word 'lumbering' I go, 'Oh, that's probably the part they want me to read for.'

I first watched 'Adhe Adhure' in college. I loved it, and it stayed with me ever since. I decided that I would some day direct this play - not in English, but in Hindi.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives.

I'm not a booky actor, I don't go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I'm more interested in what the people we're portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.