I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.

Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?

This wasn't the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn't.

I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.

I've never flown a kite.

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.