On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.