The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.

As we go through life our relationship with our own mortality and our inevitable demise increases.

There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

You don't really work together with Clint Eastwood. I mean, he takes the script and he shoots it - and he shoots it very faithfully.

I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.