None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.

I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

Making a film, I've learned, can be an exhausting process, due to the need for backing, distribution, etc.

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.

As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world?