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.

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

You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

People test movies within an inch of their life, so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought.