Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.

One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.

At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.

We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

I came from a hard, working-class world which, since my mother's death, had been dominated by men. I hadn't been encouraged to talk about the burden of grief, and because I was severely underdeveloped when it came to sharing my emotions, I mustn't have been the most communicative husband.

I would say, people use labels all the time, but I'm kind of a traditional Catholic: Personally, I'm opposed to abortion, and personally, I'm opposed to the death penalty.

At a big company, often size turns into constipation; it fogs the lens about what's really happening. Sometimes with size and success comes the notion that since we've done things to be successful, we have the formula and can institutionalize it. That can be death.