It's fatal to talk about acting. It sounds faintly ridiculous if you start analysing it.

We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.

I love a really good storyline.

In Hollywood films everything is tidied up at the end with clean lines and clean character definitions. It's sort of unsatisfying.

Other people have a much better idea of what I might do than I.

I haven't got a writer's discipline.

When you research someone, you actually get beyond your own preconceptions and become aware of the human being other than the image. You become empathetic and sympathetic in turn.

You can't be angsty all day or else it becomes a sort of pale angst.

I see myself as a small 'l' liberal, but not coalition liberal, necessarily.

We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.

I think we all have a selfish gene which rises to the top, sometimes. But then we're also all capable of a sudden magnanimity.

The snow in winter, the flowers in spring. There is no deeper reality.

So, ” said Zia, “you’re gonna eat your way through the whole universe, top to bottom. And then what?

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

Once a thing is known,it can't be UNknown.

You make 'em, I amuse 'em. [children]

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

This is deathless: the liberation of the mind through lack of clinging.

You can be sad for others but you don't have to take on their pain.

What we do to animals directly impacts everything, because we are all connected. It disrupts the food chain, it funds terrorism (ivory), it changes our climate, our oceans, it starts wars.