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

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

The thing that I'm most in love with is the thing that I'm writing at the moment.

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

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 don't want to direct. I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama, because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.