The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

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.

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.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.