By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

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.

I do all this alone, everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it's my head I'm locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.

Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. (...) Dropping acid on the Mekong Delta, smoking grass through a rifle barrel, flying on a helicopter with opera blasting out of loudspeakers, tracer-fire and paddy-field scenery, the smell of napalm in the morning. Long time.

I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".

Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job.

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.