Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.

Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.""I hope that's not true", I said.

The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.

I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.

I do not believe in karma. However, I practice it everyday because it tricks me into being a better person!

She was asked to pour out everything she had, but all she had was an empty soul.

England is a nation of voyeurs.

You can go left, you can go right, I don't give a damn. Just make a decision.

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

You gotta make your own fun. That's right, listen to that mother of two, she knows what I'm talking about.

Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God's person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.

You don't have to necessarily go down the drama school route, or have connections in the industry. You can just make it.

AQAL is a map of samsara, a map of the prison, but if you gonna make a prison brake,you need a good map. (laughter)

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment.