Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy.

We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.

At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

I am all for charity in judging the men who have occupied the Oval Office over the past seventy years, given the huge responsibilities the president carries across the world.

It's interesting going between small parts and then bigger roles where you carry the film. If the writing is good, and if the people involved have integrity, then you'll do it, even if it's only five minutes on screen.

I just consider being one of the luckiest people in the sense that creativity came to me and it flowed.

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.

The Fades' is its own world. If you try and link it to some religion, you have people going, 'Oh, that's not right,' with their Bible open. Let's just chuck some imagination at it.