Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

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.

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.