I just try and do something good. But as a writer, you're slightly out of control..

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important..

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?.

The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders..

You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it..

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

I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people..

Generally, I read nonfiction. Theres very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy..

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

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fa….

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 all….

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….

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories..

The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers..

I'm always pre-occupied with what it is that I'm doing at the moment..

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone..

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

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought..

Firms are a bit concerned about things like oil prices and US growth but actually the change (in firms expectations) is quite small so I think broadl….

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….

There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not ha….