If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

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

I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment.

There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

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

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.