I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.