There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.

I never feel a huge need for backstory in my novels or films. Quick sketches are often enough. When you encounter people in life - like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be - you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We're good at that. Long descriptions prior to meeting someone or as you're getting to know them almost don't work.

The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist... If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.

Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.

The thing video games had to learn was to write, which is not to let people choose their own stuff, but actually prescribe it. To say, "This character is not a blank canvas that you can project onto. I'm going to tell you what this character is like. And I'm going to tell you what happens to them. You're going to feel involved in other ways." Video games made the mistake of thinking everything had to be projectable, and this doesn't do that at all.