This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

It was hard not to be full of hope

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.