The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them--not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.