Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.

I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

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.

With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it's more a polite suggestion.

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?

'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.

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