When Apollo 13 appeared as an opportunity and I began to tackle that in as authentic a way as I possibly could, I really became enthralled by the philosophical side of space travel, and why we need to explore - what it means to us here on Earth - all of those things. I became a huge proponent.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.

Sports always works for us more allegorically or metaphorically and that's what's fantastic about why we love them. You demonstrate the limits to which a human being can go and they keep pushing the boundaries of that.

It was always hard to find stories that I felt were, in and of themselves, fresh enough and intriguing enough .

I think more and more scientists are becoming convinced that it's very likely that life forms of some kind exist all around the universe not so far from us.

The sooner we become a multi-planet species, the safer the species is, and the stronger the guarantee that we're going to continue to evolve.