My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into a monster. Which she wasn't. She was a human: somebody who loved me and somebody with a problem.

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.

I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

Most dreams are also part reality (otherwise we wouldn’t believe them), and reality happens to be a condition that gives you plenty of chances through your life to rise to - no, soar through - the occasion.