One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.

I'm attracted to the past.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.

I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.