Michael Frayn

I looked at my book list.

When I knew I was going to do this programme, I got 50 books on it that I read, and I also talked to physicists about it.

It's difficult, but physics is difficult, particularly quantum mechanics.

And I still wouldn't like to give you any account of the physics.

I've got this afternoon the director and my Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg are phoning me to ask me to explain the section about complementarity.

I'm rather dreading it.

I don't think I can...

Now I say anything coherent about it.

I could have done what 10 years ago when I wrote the play.

Well, most ideas for books and plays, they come on rather slowly.

It's like having a cold.

You sometimes get a tickle at the back of your throat and you can't think what it is.

And then gradually it resolves itself into...

Oh, gosh, this is a cold.

I've got a head cold again.

And that's how it is with most ideas for things.

You've got some sort of uneasy feeling about something that isn't quite resolved, and then you gradually begin to...

Give it some shape.

But with Headlong, I can remember the exact moment the idea came to me.

It was standing in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where I've been many times, and looking at the picture that everyone knows of Bruegel's, of the Hunters in the Snow, and the two next to it.