I'm very proud of my Scottish blood.

At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

In this age of media and Internet access, we are much more talkative than ever before.

I enjoy trying to figure out the best way to compliment the picture and not overpower it.

It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.

One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with.

I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.