Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.'

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.